


Tenebrae

by Cara_Loup



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Conflict, Eventual Romance, M/M, Memories, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 09:13:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4516212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cara_Loup/pseuds/Cara_Loup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why are you here?” Luke asked. “You disagree, whatever I do. There’s nothing much you seem to like about me these days.”<br/>“That’s not true.” Han faced him across a trench carved by too many questions. <i>You started this, damnit. Not me.</i> How many times had he told himself it was over, the friendship buried, the past wilted, and they were as good as strangers?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tenebrae

The world around him had changed so much he barely recognized anything, or anybody. 

Either that, or something had seriously warped all his perceptions. Han Solo raised his glass to keep it secure from the press of bodies around him. Sunset burned through the high windows, fracturing on goblets and jewels until glitters crisscrossed the room like miniature laser bolts. Even the light seemed drawn to this congregation of credits and complacency. They were celebrating the first anniversary of Endor, The Battle That Ended The War.

Han nodded greetings left and right as he navigated the hall. Old friends had become an abundant commodity these days, he was virtually surrounded by people with a claim to familiarity that dated back to Rebellion times. They clapped his shoulders, anecdotes from the war already lining up behind confidential smiles. They all knew General Han Solo, but he recognized few of their faces, and few wore their battered uniforms for old times’ sake. Only the veterans clung to the grim dignity of the past, as if victory could never be more than a pretty delusion. Han sympathized. He drained his glass and cracked a grin at General Rieekan, receiving the familiar stern glare in return. But even the General’s chest was heavy with light-catching decorations.

Han turned aside. Underneath his amusement simmered annoyance, coupled with self-derision. He should’ve known, after all, that accepting a general’s rank meant payment in the wrong coin. But he owed his friends a life, and their lives were already devoted to the war. Acknowledge those ties, and find yourself trapped. He’d never anticipated any of this. That motley rebel bands would congeal into a stifling system at top speed, that efficient administration would expose the true likeness between the Empire and their New Republic. And his friends all complied by casting themselves in the new mold.

Han downed another shot of Corellian brandy right at the source, then waved to the barkeep for another. He drank too much on occasions like this, Leia had pointed out more than once, but it kept him on an even keel for the most part.

His glass refilled, Han steered clear of the crush and climbed one of the galleries. From above, he could see Leia, shimmering in white, jewels glinting from her braided hair. Her head tilted, but her laughter drowned in the buzz of voices. Han swept a sharp glance across the groups strolling around the gallery. Some of the fighter pilots had taken refuge from all the swagger below and traded toasts to survival.

 _We Won the War_ was the bottom line of every conversation, redoubled and reflected by the splendor distributed around the hall. _Get over it, that was a year ago_ , Han wanted to return but never said it aloud. He ran his fingers across the gilt surface of the balustrade. Gaudy. Grotesque.

To avoid the entanglements of courtesy and nostalgia, he kept moving and checked out the alcoves for potential privacy. He’d almost reached the far side of the gallery when he caught sight of Luke.

No decoration disrupted the black outfit that joined the Jedi to the shadows. As daylight faltered, only Luke’s pale hair revealed his presence in the twilight. Drawing closer, Han saw him nod at a robed woman and her white-haired escort. Local dignitaries, Han supposed, while the better part of his attention focused on Luke.

Squared shoulders, economic gestures of the lean hands, a bright, focused gaze — Luke’s presence easily made captives of every audience. Always alert, always poised on the edge of decision as a brave new world materialized around them. Always projecting that tantalizing air of mystery.

Sure, he was something to look at. War had refined the contours of Luke’s face and frame, replacing promise with definition. But he’d grown too aware of that lately.

Something in Luke’s eyes invariably told Han that much. Wherever his friend went, hungry glances tracked him with worship, curiosity, envy. Each time he found himself exposed like that, Luke would glance around the crowd and lower his head, confirming the distance between himself and everyone else. But the line of his mouth hardened almost imperceptibly, and his open gaze guarded thoughts and feelings so well that no one guessed.

Waiting... he was constantly waiting, watching, tense to breaking point. Something inside Han twisted at the sight. And sometimes he caught himself wishing for the brash and clumsy kid, the wide-eyed dreamer he’d taken for granted until he returned like a phantom of chafing memories. Lost. Gone like the minute just past, forever out of reach. But there Han warned himself against wishing too hard.

Duly awed, the dignitaries excused themselves from Luke’s company, and Han no longer had a choice. Luke had probably caught him hovering a while ago.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked, striding up casually.

“As much as can be expected,” Luke said with a slim smile, eyes sweeping across Han’s array, the well-worn, comfortable vest and bloodstriped pants.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” Han shifted uncomfortably. “Think I should be wearing one of those high-class dress uniforms?”

Luke’s gaze settled on his face again. “I’m just not sure I like what I see,” he said quietly.

Han’s breath turned cold in his chest, and he forced it out angrily. “Is that right? Then let me tell you one thing, kid. The feeling’s mutual. I look at what’s become of you, and I don’t like it one bit.”

“Honest to the gods and straightforward,” Luke said mockingly. “What is it that you see?”

“Perfection.” Han’s mouth twisted itself into a tight grin. “Several degrees below zero. You’ve turned perfectly cold.”

Something passed through Luke’s gaze and was steeled away fast. “Look no further, ask no questions, just stick to appearances,” he said. “Seems like that’s your new credo, Han. I’m sure it makes life a lot easier.”

“You’re the one to talk!” Han shot back. Stifled anger finally cut through the wary courtesy they’d used round each other for months. “You stopped asking questions long ago, you’re so busy living up to everybody’s expectations that you just can’t see—”

“What?” Luke asked sharply. “That things aren’t always working out? That this New Republic isn’t quite what we’d thought it would be? Not yet, anyway. But public sulking isn’t going to change that.”

“ _Sulking_ , huh?” Han folded his arms. Set free at last, anger warmed his stomach. “Hey, I only call it like I see it, and everyone’s welcome to disagree.”

“Grumbling about it is cheap,” Luke said in a level voice. “You cultivate that attitude, but that’s all you ever do. You play the rebel, flaunt your independence, always ready to turn your back on everyone. Only you never do that. And I don’t think you could.”

“Oh no? Look again, kid! I’m still the guy your old man Kenobi hired. Still got my ship and the contacts it takes to make a living. And one of these days, I might just go back to where I was before.”

Luke shook his head. “You’re not the same anymore, Han, take it from me.”

It was judgment passed on him, brightening Han’s anger into rage because he’d given Luke the right. “What d’you want me to do, fall to my knees and repent?” he scoffed. “You’re the one who’s changed, Luke, but you’re too damn scared to take just one good look at yourself. ‘Cause you’ve got everything, and it’s still not enough. ‘Cause you’ll never have everything you want!”

A flare of temper broke the smooth surface at last. “How would you know?” Luke snapped. “You stopped wanting a long time ago.”

Han let him brush past, content that he’d scored, that he’d penetrated those perfect shields at least for a split second. He didn’t turn to watch Luke walk away from him.

* * *

A spearhead of brightness fell into the darkened room.

“Here you are!” Leia left the door open behind herself. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Been here for a while.” Han endured her brief scrutiny and reached for the glass on the table beside him. The slanting light picked out flowering patterns in the plush carpet, purple and gold.

“Why are you sitting in the dark as if somebody had died?” Leia continued, transparent in her effort to lighten the mood.

“Nobody died,” Han snapped.

As soon as Leia waved her palm across the controls, discreetly placed glowspheres wakened around the lounge.

“It’s only a figure of speech,” she said, mildly disturbed. Smooth illumination spilled across heavy amberwood furniture, across paintings and tapestries and delicate crystal arranged on the table.

“Is this how it’s going to be every year from now on?” Han waved a hand at all the obtrusive splendor. “I don’t think I can handle it.”

“We’ll see a change of locale, I’m sure, but for the rest of it...” Leia pulled up a chair for herself. “Yes, I think we’ll have annual celebrations for a long time to come. It serves to remind everyone of our common goals.” Diplomatic flexibility, a tactical vision of years ahead: Leia thrived on that fare. But she knew well enough that he didn’t.

When she smiled, offering reconciliation, Han could almost see the deep green of Endor’s forests reflected in her eyes. Only a year ago, but they’d all been so much younger.

“I don’t like this place,” he said.

“Accepting the invitation was a necessary gesture. We need the Noble Houses’ support.”

“Maybe I don’t like our new allies either,” Han returned with less acerbity than he might have used a few hours ago — before the subject was relegated to the ranks of welcome distractions. “Nobility trimming their sails to the wind, whichever way it blows. They supported the Empire.”

“Not all of them,” Leia said patiently. “Who do you think sponsored the Rebellion all those years? The house of Alderaan was by no means alone in opposing Imperial policies.”

“If you say so.”

Leia left her seat and began to remove the jewelry from her ears, throat and hair.

“What’s eating you, really?” she asked with resolute gentleness.

Han took another swig of his drink, exasperation burning in his throat alongside the potent liquor. “You know me too damn well. It’s gonna turn into a problem one of these days.”

“Only if you insist on being enigmatic.” Jewelry clinked softly on polished wood. With a sigh, Leia began to undo her braids.

For a few moments Han seriously considered an answer, but his sarcasm dissolved as he watched, absently admiring the graceful curve of her neck. Some months ago, he might have stood behind her to play his hands through the silky cascades falling across Leia’s back, to bury accumulated frustration in her embrace. But the attraction between them had been too volatile to weather the reality of diverging backgrounds, hopes, and needs. They’d both accepted that disillusioning truth before friendship became an impossibility because too many secrets had been shared, and too many promises broken.

His silence had lasted too long, Han realized, when Leia threw him a questioning glance. 

“Don’t wanna talk about it,” he said. Better that than admitting that he couldn’t. The bleak sense of satisfaction had faded incredibly fast.

Leia brushed several unruly strands from her face, then paused, the living image of quiet vigilance. “It’s Luke, isn’t it? I heard you had an argument.”

“You heard? Then why d’you ask?” Han snapped.

“Diplomatic reflex — and I’m sorry,” she answered. Her hand settled on Han’s shoulder in a light, undemanding touch as she passed behind him. “I’m going to bed.”

“Sweet dreams,” he muttered querulously.

A subtle scent that mixed almond with the essence of spring lingered long after Leia had withdrawn to her bedroom. Han let darkness close around him again and fingered the rim of his glass while his mind chased the conversation with Luke through another rerun, and he wondered why the stark, unquestionable truth could feel so wrong.

Memory was an affliction, imposed on sentients to balance every sin, every missed chance — and he remembered now, compulsively. The sound of laughter in the Falcon’s cockpit, the glitter of pride and affection in Luke’s eyes, reflecting a first shared victory. First to falter and fail in the hard grip of reality: that radiance of undaunted confidence. That smile — rare and brilliant — gods, why should he bother with recollection when all it ever amounted to was a casualty list? Why struggle so hard to bring something back—?

It would keep him awake all night. Avoiding the answer that lodged in his bone-marrow and had him strung like a wire. The answer his body gave like a challenge, cut off from reason and warning. Damn Luke.

At the core of his angry frustration sat the real trouble Han refused to acknowledge, churning, gnawing at him, wanting...

 _You stopped wanting a long time ago_.

If only that was true.

By dawn, he was ready to apologize just to make it stop, but the crisp grey twilight brought on intense weariness, and he surrendered gratefully to sudden sleep.

* * *

_Apologize — for what?_ Han thought as he stepped out into the main hangar and welcomed the noise, the bellicose glare of jets, the acrid smells of coolant and cleaning fluids. Pilots in flightsuits jogged towards the parked fighters, unhurried and purposeful.

All the signs said war, no matter last night’s reiteration of triumph. Immune to schemes of glory and ultimate conquest, war never ceased entirely; driven back, it simply scattered into fragments, all very much alive. Campaigns in one star system, raids and domestic conflicts in the next. And the strike forces still lived by the dictates of battle.

Han walked across fluorescent lines and arrows painted on duracrete, appraised the vestal polish of untried fighters and let the soft thrums of energy merge with his own pulse. Without thought he headed for the Falcon. He wouldn’t leave before tomorrow, but there’d be modifications to schedule, obstinate malfunctions to consider. Enough to keep him busy.

Half an hour ago, Luke’s quarters had greeted him with untouched tidiness, and that settled the whole miserable apologizing business. Staring around the empty room, Han had reminded himself that Luke had as much to be sorry for as he did, then walked away half-relieved, half-annoyed. But relief won the contest within the space of a few more heartbeats.

“Chewie?” Han called into the dimness surrounding his ship.

“He’s getting something from maintenance,” said a voice at his back. “Won’t be long.”

A bright red flightsuit shone from the gloom when Han turned. Hands jammed into his pockets, Wedge Antilles strode towards him — a quiet, lanky man and about the only survivor of Yavin who’d refused rank and privilege in favor of continuing front-line hazard.

“Hey, Wedge,” Han said. “Have you seen Luke this morning?”

“He left before dawn,” Wedge answered over a sudden screech of hydraulics struggling with gravity, “and half the squad with him. They’ll try ‘n take supplies past the siege in the Ithorian girdle.”

“Volunteered, huh?” Han masked a stir of disquiet with a short laugh. “Luke’s gonna try stopping earthquakes with his bare hands next, I guess.”

The forced humor glanced off and brought no reaction, except a tightening around the other man’s eyes. “You wanna think about what you say, Solo,” Wedge returned coolly. “And think good.”

Baffled, Han stared at him. “What’d I do?”

For an instant, his brain locked up and his facial muscles felt frozen until reason kicked in to suggest that Wedge must’ve heard about the argument, just like Leia. Rumor traveled faster than light in the microcosm of the budding New Republic.

Wedge regarded him thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Luke hadn’t mentioned it. Not to Wedge or anyone on his short list of friends deserving the name. He wouldn’t.

“So, uh, what about the other half of the squad?” Han asked. “How about you? You’re not going to Ithor?”

“We’ll be cleared for departure in a few hours, I expect,” Wedge answered in a carefully neutral tone. “Some of our X-wings have been refitted, and they’re not quite done with the check-up yet.”

“Wedge,” Han said on a deep breath. “I didn’t mean that, okay? Not the way it sounded.”

A shrug and a half-smile were offered in response. “Okay.” Wedge jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Gotta go ‘n start up my own crate. What’s next for you?”

“You know what it’s like,” Han returned with a grimace. “I do battles by numbers these days. From a desk.”

“You’d better think of something that’ll force them to demote you.” Sparing him a sympathetic grin, Wedge turned away. “So long. I’ll see you on Corellia, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Han muttered and almost called him back. But there was no message for Luke he could think of.

From the Falcon’s cockpit, he watched another X-wing roll into takeoff position, and the roar of its powerful engine plunged straight for the pit of his stomach. Like Wedge and any other Corellian pilot in the fleet, Han had been brought up under Imperial occupation, to the smells and the taste of war, raised in the spirit of insubordination wherever, whenever possible. _Born to the drum_ , as people said on Corellia, _hell-bent and hungry. Born to fly_.

He’d refused the patriotic call to resistance long enough, until it finally caught up with him in the Yavin system, assuming the angry voice of a half-grown boy who thought he could beat an Empire. From the eyes of that farmboy, a younger Han Solo had stared back at him. Brazen and outrageously naive and armed to the teeth with impertinent ideals. And once rekindled, those phantasms — democracy, freedom, peace, the whole load of garbage — had resisted every attempt to put them back to sleep.

Which Han tried to achieve, every goddamn hour of the day — even now. Because the dreams they’d flaunted like a banner were still far from coming real. And Luke of all people should have been first and foremost in supporting Han’s insistent, vocal opposition.

 _Grumbling about it is cheap_.

The remembered reproach struck almost as hard as it had the night before. Another flash of nervous tension drove Han from his seat. He leaned across the flight console until his forehead made contact with the transparisteel viewport and its coolness invaded him, isolating the one question that circled fretfully in his mind.

_Goddamnit, what’s become of us?_

Outside, a service car transported a group of astromech droids to the waiting X-wings. Achingly familiar procedures and sights. This could have been anywhere, Han thought. Yavin Four, or Hoth, or Corellia. The same harsh lines and uncompromising lights, all the goodbyes and reunions... with Luke. The farmboy turned Rebel Commander turned Jedi knight. Changing to a point on the very limits of recognition.

 _So what?_ Han asked himself. Change was the law of this random universe, and he had no one but himself to blame for tossing better insight to the winds. For trapping himself in the fallacies of very noble, very exacting ideals. Like friendship.

 _Friends_. Han chewed on the word as he thought about Luke. It had been the kind of demanding friendship he’d refused for years, and for very good reasons. Too close, too volatile.

Eyes bleak, he surveyed the busy hangar, implored the relief he no longer felt, because something had finally snapped and come to pieces last night. Recollection staggered aimlessly across the minefield in his head.

He remembered a time when sudden changes came over Luke, when frantic pain burned in his eyes, and all he wanted was to make it stop — but he’d never been good at things like that, and after a while the moods passed entirely. Composure stayed on like a second skin. Luke had stopped trying.

Before the missed opportunities could blow up in his face, Han turned from the viewport and the ambiguous lure of regret. He threw himself into the flight chair, activated the console and faced the last night head-on. The memory that concluded several years: bright and hard and untouchable like a holograph set in crystal.

The precise grace that marked Luke’s movements, the tilt of the blond head, and the barely visible lines around his eyes. A smile that strained just a little around the edges, and a deep, lingering stillness in his gaze. Luke had become a perfect stranger whose very presence electrified Han into bristling resentment —

 _What’s to be sorry for?_ he defended himself yet again.

He’d told Luke nothing but the truth. Just as well that he’d had no chance to try false peacemaking, and if there was an irrational, scalding bitterness attached to the memory... well, that was the natural flavor of truth. It would fade eventually.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Solitude claimed Luke as he pointed his X-wing towards the cold depths of space. Layers of blackness opened up before him and eyed him with stars. Countless, fragile wells of uncontainable light.

He breathed easier, now that he was alone. He could face himself and the chafing ache of the night before where no company masked the isolation. Where the brittle silver and vast blackness of night became his mirror — light of the Rebellion, only hope, only son — son of this infinite, uncaring darkness on the borders of ordinary life. Alone with himself.

 _Several degrees below zero_ , Luke recalled. Words that stung with rapier precision, and he circled that sting, again and again stunned breathless — _not you, Han, don’t you know?_

He’d invited Han’s anger, because he’d seen it build and come towards him like the first, restless wave in a flood. Without cause, without discernible shape, like the vague disturbance of a shadow falling across him. Suggesting, never touching, not quite —

And if he could jar Han’s anger loose, maybe other feelings would follow. But the tide that came had caught him cold.

He could still see the intensity in Han’s glance, the abrupt motions of his hands, the hard set of his shoulders. Han’s accusation had cut across the years as if the past were a breathing, living thing, clothed in skin that could rip and bleed. Between them, they had shared that past, until Han declared it dead. Cutting him loose.

Luke told himself it was what he should have expected the moment he claimed his new title. _Jedi. Like My Father Before Me_.

Sometimes it felt as if he’d been holding his breath all along, coiled around that breathlessness within, waiting for someone to look at him and speak his name. To look at Vader’s son... and beyond.

A year and a day had passed since the proclamation of victory, and he was still waiting for the delivery of truth. After Endor, his troubling descent from the Dark Lord of the Empire had been contained like a fire in dry woodland. Besides Han and Leia, only the inner circle of Command had been informed. Under oath of silence, Luke anticipated the leak that would spill the news sooner or later. Worship would be stripped down to the basic ingredients of mistrust and resentment, and then at least part of the waiting would be over.

The truth, so the saying promised, would set him free. Color the shadows darker and the lights brighter, and maybe grant him a life to knit the rest of his wounds.

 _But you’ll never have everything you want_.

Echoes of instinctive denial and angry longing had stayed with him from the night before, and Luke inhaled deeply, letting it come —

_Everything I want?_

Han’s words had reopened another old wound he’d refused to consider. Until now. Small cuts went the deepest sometimes.

* * *

“Luke? You awake?” asked a friendly voice across a short distance.

“I wish I wasn’t,” Luke grumbled and opened his eyes to a blinding torrent of light slanting through the jungle canopy, extending a small grin. “How about you, Wedge?”

A rumor of voices swelled and ebbed all around him, like a sonic echo of the heat playing across his skin, in the aftermath of battle. In the fizzle and hum of Ithor’s restless activities, Luke felt a lingering edge of desperation.

Standing a long stride away from him, Wedge rubbed one shoulder with a grimace. “Passed out in a chair for about half an hour and woke up slipping off it,” he said. “I dunno what’s wrong with me. I’m too hot, got a headache and a funny feeling in my stomach.”

“When was your last meal?”

“Good point.” Wedge shrugged. “But that problem’s gonna be solved soon. I’ve heard the Ithorian clan chiefs are planning a banquet in your honor.”

“In _my_ honor?” Luke leaned into the curve of a gnarled root and shook his head. “It was you who led the squadron, Wedge. Not me.”

“You know what it’s like. Once you’re a hero, fame comes chasing after you. I can do without that, thanks.”

A sympathetic smile followed the words, and Luke tried to match it, composing his expression into a mask of reassurance.

They’d survived Yavin together, and for Wedge Antilles that memory outblazed every other reality. He saw the brash rookie pilot, not the hero, the Jedi — and certainly not Vader’s son. But for how much longer? And then Wedge would recall how Darth Vader had personally shot his friends and squad-mates out of the sky.

“Wanna know something?” Wedge said idly, eyes following a group of Ithorians who shuffled past. “When I’m flying, that’s the only time I worry about nothing these days, no matter what’s coming at me. Crazy, huh?”

“No.” Luke looked up at the sky where high cloud masses were pushing towards the sun, preparing this afternoon’s rainfall. “It used to be the same for me. For a while.”

“It’s something you’re born with, I guess.” Another smile formed, drifted across Wedge’s mouth with unspoken recollections. Then, abruptly, he said, “I ran into Han shortly before I left. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him so unhappy.”

He paused for a beat, and Luke stiffened in automatic reaction.

“Han’s a pilot at heart,” Wedge continued. “He can be good with people, but not if it’s part of the job description, know what I mean? This — being a general — is taking the life out of him.”

 _I know_. Luke breathed in, carefully slow, and waited for more, but Wedge just watched him, his head tilted slightly to one side. Of course. Han had said nothing.

The silence was stretching, in a way that could breed unwanted questions. Luke caught himself. “I suppose none of us realized when we signed up with the Rebellion,” he said, with a cautious dose of humor. “We signed our lives away, and who knows when we’ll have them back.”

Platitudes. Too obviously so, perhaps. Wedge sent a troubled glance his way.

“Yeah. Who knows,” he echoed indecisively. “Listen, Luke, you need a rest, and I’ll let you sleep while you can. Okay?”

He marched away like the soldier he was, a slight stoop to his shoulders.

Since their arrival in the Ithorian girdle, Luke had spared only two short hours for sleep. He stretched his arms in an effort to shake loose the residue of a troubled dream which had left him with the sensation of a scalding touch.

Just before Wedge had woken him, he’d dreamed about Han. Luke recalled a brush of fingertips against his cheek before Han draped a heavy medal round his neck. The touch ran through him with a long, velvet chill — and then an all-consuming whiteness blasted across a star-forsaken sky. So much for trying not to think about it too hard.

Luke watched the clouds pile up slowly, surreptitiously, and resolved that he’d talk to Han right after he’d returned to Corellia. He had to understand what it was that Han saw, or thought he saw. And he still felt Han’s resentment like a persistent, slow burning.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

_Get it over with_ , Han told himself one more time. _Have it out with him_ — just before he realized that the entire south wing of the transfer station had been transformed into a maximum security zone.

The convoy from Ithor had entered Corellia’s orbit hours ago, and he was late. But the first Han saw when he left the flitterpark was the fluorescent yellow of a hovering ambulance, and the phalanx of med techs in white environment suits. Shrouded head to foot, they secured the building like a brood of oversized larvae. Han crossed the distance in edgy strides. Coming here had probably been a bad idea from the get-go.

“No entry except for medical personnel,” a muffled voice stopped him. “This facility is closed for traffic as of 1300 hours, sir.”

“Closed?” He stared hard at an opaque face-shield, searching for a hint of human eyes. “I’m in a hurry. What’s going on here?”

“Virus containment, sir,” the voice answered, genderless and tired. “Please move along.”

 _The hell I will_ , sat on his tongue. Han swallowed it and glanced across the med tech’s shoulder, through heavy duraglass portals. Inside, droids were installing air filters, but the next set of doors was sealed, eight square meters of black steel. None of the passengers who’d shuttled down from the orbital docks had passed the airlock yet.

“Sir? Move on, please.”

“Now listen—!” Han caught the bite in his tone and paused for breath. “I’m here to see someone who returned with the convoy from Ithor,” he said. “If this part of the station’s closed, then I need to know where their shuttle landed.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the tech answered, “but everyone who was part of that convoy has been placed under strict quarantine. Please refer to the clinic for further information.”

“What — what kind of virus?” Han heard himself ask while some tocsin went off in his head and sent liquid ice racing through his veins.

“Please, sir,” the tech repeated, patience straining. “There’s nothing more I can tell you.”

For a few moments, Han was tempted to insist, to wait and perhaps catch a glimpse of Luke through several inches of safety glass. But instead he returned to the flitterpark, raced his glider back to headquarters, and from there called up the clinic. His breath came hard as if he’d been running the whole way.

The clinic’s com board was overflowing with concerned calls, and Han pulled rank on several overworked members of staff until he was finally put through to the quarantine ward. By the time the supervising doctor answered his call, he felt every muscle in his body, strung tight and bunched up in some unadmitted prayer for good news.

“Luke Skywalker,” he said. “Is he with the group they brought in today? The contingent returning from Ithor?”

“Yes,” the doctor answered mildly. “Skywalker is here, and there is no immediate danger to him or any other member of the group. This is, quite simply, a precautionary measure.”

“What I saw at the transfer station didn’t look like routine to me,” Han objected testily. “What about the virus?”

He heard a faint sigh at the other end of the line.

“The virus causes headaches and light fever in healthy adults,” the doctor explained. “However, it is highly infectious and dangerous to infants and everyone of fragile constitution.”

“You’re kidding me!” Han snorted. “Don’t you think it’s a little ridiculous to put everyone under quarantine just because they’ve caught some kind of alien flu?”

“With a group this large, all returning to their friends and families, the virus could spread rapidly. Strict quarantine procedures are the only—”

“How long?” Han cut in. “How long until they can leave?”

“A week, at the very least.”

“A week,” Han echoed. “I won’t be here by then.”

“Are you family to Skywalker?” the doctor asked with impersonal sympathy.

Han closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. “I’m his best friend,” he told a nameless, faceless stranger and knew it was true, in spite of everything. Not that he’d ever had a choice. “Tell him I called — no, don’t tell him. Doesn’t matter, it’ll have to wait. Thanks, doctor.”

The com console clicked off.

 _That’s that_ , Han thought. Days of working up to this moment had run into another dead end. He could feel it now, a vaguely hollow sensation in his stomach. Without giving it much thought, he’d prepared to see Luke, to say — what?

Yet Luke had made no attempt to contact him, throughout the weeks since his departure.

Just to see him then. And make sure there was no reason for the insistent, haunting tension. No reason at all.

* * *

The flowers Leia had sent him were a scalding, clinical white. Alderaani orchids, transplants from a lost world, the color of innocence and mourning.

Luke leaned back into the medo-chair, offered his forearm to the nurse droid’s syringe and watched as it filled with his reluctant blood. A gradient decline on the monitor offered electrical testimony. The level of leukocytes was decreasing each day, the evidence of infection approaching nil. And then they’d let him go.

A small drop of blood formed where the needle had punctured his skin. Luke caught himself staring at it. Each hospital room with its white glare and stiff smells brought back the weeks of sickbay confinement, one and a half years ago. Carefully conditioned air rasping in his lungs, jerking from drugged sleep to stare at the stump where his right hand should have been, maimed and wounded to the very core of every hope. The subtle stigma of difference sinking through all the layers of his soul. And no doubt that had been his father’s intention.

“Thank you,” the nurse intoned, and he nodded, rising to pace the familiar distance from the chair to the window, past the steel-framed bed.

The clinic teemed with a struggle for survival, and Luke felt as if he’d been wired to an immense electrical field. As clearly as the room’s harsh brightness, he sensed the outrage. Bewildered pain, the blind throes of the dying, life and heartbeat ebbing from the electronic grasp of medical equipment. Luke closed his eyes and his mind.

During unguarded moments like these, he was too vulnerable to the agonies of others, he felt the press of violent needs and grievances as if the world were trying to crawl inside his skull, driving him ever inward — until someday there’d be nowhere left to retreat.

 _So much to do and so little of me and never enough time_. Never the stillness, the silence he craved.

Luke concentrated until the sensations no longer scraped across his raw nerves, until the echoes of death stopped whispering their accusations and went back to lodging in his bones. Until the world was reduced to the white background noise he constantly lived with.

 _I’ll look in on you as soon as I’m back_ , read the note that had arrived with the flowers, written in the usual, energetic scribble.

One and a half years ago, Leia had spent every free hour at his bedside, but the viewport and the remote spread of stars had captured her gaze, soft with sadness and longing. Her mind bent on reminiscence, on far-flung plans to rescue Han. Unnoticed, Luke had drifted along those tenuous emotional currents and shared them. It was then that he’d first felt the kinship between himself and Leia.

Luke brushed his fingertips over the white petals. He’d tried to reach Han, but when they finally let him put a call through, he’d been informed that General Solo had left Corellia to inspect several recently installed garrisons on far-out fringe worlds and would be gone for weeks.

The waiting continued. Even now, as Luke traced the orchid’s rough silk, discordant feelings stirred inside him. Something had been left hanging in mid-air, off-balance, because he’d been struck mute before he could explain. Because he’d never expected it to hurt so much.

And the hurt had felt like deliverance.

 _Explain_ , Luke told himself.

A stranger had taken Han’s place, from inside, and it disturbed Luke that Han could change at all. That all his blunt clarity and impulsive strength could fall victim to time and a bitter kind of complacency. While he still remembered Han from the day they’d met, the laughter in his eyes and the sharp edge of humor that spared no one, certainly not Han Solo himself.

 _A soul like a shadow of the sea_ , went the chorus of a popular Corellian song that reminded him of Han each time. Always out for some horizon, in answer to a siren-song of his own invention. Until Han’s mind had started to lose those hard places and sheer drops.

A pilot at heart, according to Wedge. Luke shook his head reflexively. _We’re no longer flying, neither of us, we’re just... enduring_. But unlike him, Han had a choice.

 _Prove it_ , Luke thought, _prove that you can still leave_.

Between them, a drift had set in, barely noticeable at first, until the sight of Han suddenly brought a strange, hollow ache to his chest. A clear distance would have been infinitely preferable to the false nearness.

 _Leave — so you can come back. Maybe_.

Luke paced the length of his quarantine cubicle, the words churning with wanton intensity, and he wanted them out — right now — but Han had nothing more to say to him. Perhaps he’d already forgotten.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

The streets of Coruscant were like scars cleaving the ravaged cityscape. War had feasted on the Imperial core world for several weeks, until there was little left to defend and the Empire’s elite servants bargained for safe conduct out of the system.

Shoulders hunched against the biting wind, Han marched towards one of the transport cabins. All around him stretched the signs of the New Republic’s ultimate triumph, the broken teeth of ancient towers and steelstone blocks which had by chance survived the bombardment. The streets were deserted. Han punched the cabin’s controls and shook his head when closing doors screened the carnage from view.

Twelve levels down, one of the lower-class entertainment sectors was still operational and astir with defiantly displayed levity. Of Coruscant’s populace, only the politically immune variety had stayed behind. Traders, bar-owners, hookers, and the entire range of underpaid technicians, all prepared to make their living off the imminent reconstruction works. As he walked among them, Han could almost pretend he was back among his own, back on familiar grounds.

He glanced up at a patch of sky, very high above, beset by neon signs that challenged the gloom of early evening. Done for the day. He’d pick a place for a couple of drinks that would put sleep into his bones, then turn himself in. From the entrance of a large mall, the shimmers of a public holo booth beckoned for attention.

Han paused in the doorway and studied the interplay of colors assuming form at the center of the booth, his mind wandering while the program chattered through a random assortment of news. And then a single image struck out at him and snapped him to instant alarm.

Liquid sparkles defined an image of Luke, his pale face framed by violent darkness. Taken in an unfavorable light, the holograph painted new shadows and hollows into his face, complemented by the black uniform. Deprived of his voice, Luke’s lips moved incessantly.

Han took a moment to tune in and follow the newscaster’s revelations.

Shock, so the incorporeal voice claimed, had seized the enlightened minds of the galaxy today, when it became known that the son of Darth Vader held rank and influence among the New Republic’s leaders. Han stepped into the booth with a muttered, incredulous curse when a rustle at his back made him wheel.

“Luke?” The name was out before Han could begin to doubt his sanity.

From the surrounding dimness stepped the holograph’s material shadow.

“Yes,” Luke said in a tone of resignation.

Time and space had contrived to collapse somehow, and to churn out this impossible coincidence. For a moment it tugged on him like a vertigo effect. Han shook his head and glanced back at the slowly faltering image. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

“If you’re asking, why am I on Coruscant, the answer is that I’m here for a look at the Imperial archives. If you’re referring to this place, I was... advised to watch the news tonight. And I couldn’t make myself stay indoors.”

“Damn.” Han stepped away from the next bout of newsflashes. “Someone’s been very clever calculating the right time to spill the news, huh? Now that Leia’s away on a mission to the colonies, and there’s no one left on Corellia who could interfere.”

A sarcastic smile disrupted the flawless composure for a second. “I always expected this to happen,” Luke said. “It just came sooner than I’d thought.”

They paused outside the booth. Neon flickers danced across Luke’s face and reflected in his eyes. Two months had passed since the celebration and their argument, and the time of silence slowly pressed down on Han’s shoulders as surprise and irritation settled. When he’d returned to Corellia, Luke had already left on some obscure quest of his own. For weeks, Han had successfully ignored every thought of him, but now —

But now.

He couldn’t think. Instead of searching his mind for the fitting preamble to a serious talk, he just watched Luke. Absorbed all the little changes with something close to seismic apprehension. Luke had grown thin, tight like spun steel, only the slightest twitch of his mouth betraying his composure. His gaze answered Han’s scrutiny with unreadable interest.

Now what to say? The whole thing had moved past apologies anyway, had become a borderline that divided Before from After, the very definition of change.

“What’re you gonna do?” Han asked uncomfortably.

Luke shrugged. “What can I do? I _am_ Vader’s son. And I don’t believe in hiding away from the truth, even if they’re using it against me for their own purposes.”

“So you’ll just take what they throw at you?”

“Whatever I say now won’t change the way people feel about me. About my father.”

“How would you know? How can you—” Han cut himself short before all the wrong things could stumble out. “Any idea who put it about? Who’s behind this?”

Again, an unfamiliar touch of sarcasm stirred Luke’s expression. “Not everyone in Command believes that a Jedi should play a major role in the establishment of the New Republic. Democratic standards favor the average, not the exception to the rule, and exceptional powers can’t be trusted. Everyone remembers how my father used them.”

Han watched the small signs of tension in Luke’s face. He wondered if he could still offer sympathy and support — but Luke wouldn’t want either. And not from him.

“Can’t exactly blame ‘em,” he said evasively.

“No.” Sudden intensity gathered in Luke’s eyes. He took a step closer and asked, “How about you?”

Bracing himself without cause, Han shot back, “What about me?”

With each second that passed, his awareness of the people drifting aimlessly through the mall sharpened to discomfort, as if this should have been an absolutely private moment.

“I remember how long I took to work up the courage to tell you about it,” Luke answered, “but you never said much...” An unnerving, enigmatic smile bent his mouth. “Why, Han? Is it that you truly don’t mind — or is it that you just don’t care?”

Anger crawled up Han’s throat and face and flushed him with warmth. “You got that right,” he retorted. “I don’t care who your father was, ‘cause I don’t believe in destiny, or fixed genetic dispositions, or... whatever. Everybody’s responsible for their own lives, period.”

“Really.”

Han caught the edge of challenge in Luke’s tone, some diffuse reproach echoing their last conversation, and drew himself upright. “You’re responsible for what you do with your life,” he rephrased. “You’re on your own when—”

“Yes.”

This conversation was twisting itself into knots. “Look,” Han said, fumbling for a straightforward statement that would cut through all the tangles. “I’m sorry. Some of the things I said—”

“Sorry for the truth?” Luke shook his head. “Perhaps you’re sorry that you meant what you said. Just like I did.”

No flare of disapproval this time, something far stronger had softened Luke’s expression despite the sharp words. Challenge, or concession, or an implausible blend of both.

Before Han could answer, his comlink went off into the halting silence.

“Han,” said the tinny voice of Wedge Antilles, “better get up here. We’ve got a problem.”

Whatever the trouble was, details couldn’t be trusted to an open channel, and Han didn’t ask. “Coming,” he said shortly. Clipping the comlink to his belt, he added, “Duty calls. I’m with the survey team, you know, gotta take stock of the vehicles and the technical equipment — or whatever’s left of it.”

“Go ahead,” Luke said in a tone of perfect dispassion.

Han gave a tight nod. “All right. I guess I — I’ll see you later.”

 

When Han rejoined his team at the shipyards, security scans had turned up an odd number of detonator charges that’d been hooked up with select airlock systems.

“They’re set to blow the instant you depressurize these docking bays,” Wedge explained. “Bound to collapse the whole structure. Last line of defense, I suppose.”

“Lucky we’ve used only the landing platforms so far,” Han said. “How many?”

By the time they’d located and removed all the charges, dawn was eating into the sky. About ready to crash, Han still followed Wedge into the patched-up mess hall for a drink that would shut down his mind. Seven hours of touch and go hadn’t obliterated the memory of Luke. Damn him for returning like this, for moving so quietly, catching Han unprepared. And he was almost ready to believe, by now, that Luke had approached him on purpose. With scarcely a glance for the dispenser’s available choice, Han tapped out a nervous order.

From the other side of the mess hall, the holo projector announced a storm warning.

“Storms?” Han asked no one in particular, while he carried his drink over to a plastene table. “How can there be storms in an atmosphere like this?”

“Something weird about the climate here,” one of the techs answered. “They’ve flattened out the natural landscapes to build all those towers, and the winds get to catch between ‘em. Won’t be safe now that everything’s nothin’ but rubble waiting to fall down.”

“I don’t like this place.” Han molded his aching back to the chair’s uncomfortable form and sipped on his beer.

“It’ll be a while before the government can be moved here.” Wedge turned from the holographic simulation of cyclones twisting above Coruscant. “Cheers.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Han muttered.

Around him, the room fell silent, and that abrupt silence snapped his head back in premonition. The holo beam wavered, the lower dissolution blurred the contours of Luke’s face, but this image had already burned itself into the back of Han’s mind.

He stalked across and pulled the projector’s plug, noting surreptitious glances that swept aside when he stared around the room. Wedge was busy contemplating his half-drained glass.

“You’d already heard?” Han sat, forcing the anger down with another quick gulp of beer. He could imagine the headlines, careening into each other in their haste to beget scandal. Child of Evil. Son of the Sith.

Wedge nodded. “It’s been on every major net since last night.”

“It’s not his fault. Nobody gets to pick their families.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“Takes a little time to get used to the idea,” Wedge answered wearily. “And it... explains a few things about him, I guess.”

“It doesn’t. Not really.” Considering what he’d just said, Han shook his head and leaned across the table. “Do you realize what’s happening here? This is exactly how they want it to go! Get people to treat him like he’s a walking contamination hazard. Get _him_ to believe that, too.”

Wedge lifted his gaze with some reluctance. “So what can you do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Han said softly. “I really don’t.”

* * *

Early morning had washed a hazy, fragile blue into the sky. Out on the landing platform, Han invited the harsh wind to clear the fogs from his head and cool his face while he studied the Falcon, her hull reflecting a high gleam that shone almost white. When was the last time that he’d raced her through the maws of perdition?

 _Next time is what matters_ , Han told himself. When he looked at the sky, he could feel his blood. He could pledge himself to the old summons of infinity and return —

 _Go back to where I was before? Yeah, right_. Whatever judgment he’d acquired over the years should be flaring him the brightest danger signs, if living backwards had become an option. _Go where? And for what?_

 _Always ready to turn your back_ , he heard Luke say, _but I don’t think you could_. And suddenly Han traced a fine note of compassion in Luke’s tone — or was it regret?

He wondered now if they’d looked to each other for security, for a limit to all those changes. Entirely absurd, considering the vast differences between them, to make Luke his mirror — but where else would he turn for this questioning, challenging friction? And no one had ever looked at him that way, eyes blue like the pale, haunted sky, probing for the worst of him, for deeper, irrevocable change. So that they could both let go, perhaps.

Fatigue dizzied his thoughts, but the memory of Luke clung obstinately when Han boarded the Falcon and surrendered himself to the cool enclosure of his solitary bunk.

He dreamed, with the intensity of a nightmare, violating his escape into sleep. And yet this dream was nothing like the usual, crude combination of half-forgotten fears and bad memories. It was a lucid, tranquil attack on all his senses in the dead of sleep.

Across a vast plain he walked towards a river, straight and silver like a living frontier. The sky above was sunless, and the waters bright as a mirror, wide and gentle where they overflowed the banks. He waded in to the ankle, to the knee, until the clear water rose to his hips and caressed his stomach with tender indifference. Holding his breath when it reached up higher to close around his chest, he waded in... and in...

Han woke to the rasping sounds of his own breath and a sweet fury reeling through his body. Somebody else’s dream, proposed his recoiling mind. Somebody else’s fear of drowning in himself. But when he ran a hand down the dampness of his chest and followed the residual music playing through his nerves, he believed for an insane second that he’d felt Luke touch him.

Inside and out.

* * *

Luke scribbled a signature on the bottom of his print-out. Framed by tall shadows, regimented ceiling and slate-top desk, the librarian smiled at him. Of all the high-ranking functionaries, one woman had stayed behind and disobeyed orders that condemned the archives’ filed and registered secrets to various forms of elimination. Instead of observing Imperial protocols, the librarian had deactivated a small army of droids, preferring the silent company of computer banks, book-shelves, and cabinets filled with scripted artifacts, one hall after the next. She had cinnabar hair, the color of rusted iron in the rain, and an unsuspected smile that took several years off Luke’s initial guess.

“You’re making fast progress,” she said approvingly, as she checked several items on his list and handed it over.

Nodding thanks, Luke picked up a set of data wafers and headed back towards the inner sanctum. He had no idea at what pace she lived to consider his progress swift. Between the staggering quantities of information and the chronic half-light of the archives, his time sense was evaporating. Sometimes he slept, sometimes he ate, but those intermissions left no mark on his mind.

The new files dated back to the Emperor’s Jedi Purge and consisted entirely of names and dates. The length of the list settled in Luke’s stomach with a cold heaviness, substantiating the title he carried. Last of the Jedi. Names and figures adding up to solitude, mute and sober. Luke blanked the screen and accessed a file marked with the crimson label of maximum confidentiality.

He read for hours or days, until every capacity for comprehension was exhausted, thoughts and images firing at random in his mind. He floated in this autonomic silence, recalling vaguely that silence had been his one admitted desire, the only desire left after a private purge.

By necessity, he’d turned his heart away from the chaos of finite reality, from appearances and entanglements, forging tempering paths for thought and feeling that somehow muted his call to life and accepted as compensation the abstract, profound presence of the Force. Something in him had darkened. To greater insight and resignation — so much that at times he’d feared every shade of life would be swallowed up in the clouded brown he saw when he closed his eyes, the color of apathy.

But not lately. And the silence recoiled from him as if he’d wronged it.

Perhaps he’d been wrong about himself, if so much unreasoning hope and defiance could leap up at a few words. An incidental glance. A hopeless confrontation.

 _Look again, kid. I’m still the same_.

Han no longer called him kid — except in anger.

Luke breathed out into cool dryness, the carefully conditioned air that preserved centuries of knowledge, while his mind circled much closer moments.

Han’s eyes reflecting the dimness of the holo booth and his image.

 _You’re on your own_.  
_Don’t say you’re sorry_.

Han’s eyes had almost spoken to him. With a promise of the familiar sarcasm, the unyielding, unattainable presence of a man always ready to tear loose.

 _But now you see me. At last_.

Shock raced through him and gathered into questions. Was he trying to reanimate the past, get even, play out what might have been?

Years ago, his feelings for Han had never been accorded a name. He’d kept them a secret from himself, almost within reach but never tangible — as if he could strike a deal with life to give him what he wanted by making no conscious wish. He could no longer keep it that way.

The same and not the same. But perhaps he’d been wrong about Han, too, and the passion was still there, just buried, trapped —

Suddenly, his pulse rushed into a quicker pace at the sound of bootheels clicking on ancient marble. Luke battled an impulse to close his eyes because coincidence never cooperated like that. Except now.

 _Be careful what you wish for_.

Han passed the arching doorway, barely checking his stride for a brief glance left and right.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been here all this time,” he said without preliminary, across the research desk. “Sweet mother, this place is like a tomb! Not a single window.”

“Daylight is too aggressive for some of the books,” Luke answered automatically. But his eyes were on Han and the short Corellian jacket accenting broad shoulders and narrow waist, the color of midnight. “Yeah,” he said at length. “I’ve been here for a while.”

Han shook his head. “You should see yourself.”

His tone carried reproach and something else that Luke, blinded by his sharp awareness of Han, couldn’t identify.

“You know, I don’t think it’s such a bright idea to bury yourself here right now,” Han continued. “You should talk to people—”

“Like who?”

“Like Wedge,” Han said. “It’s not that any of our bunch thinks you’re a monster, still it’s... confusing. Hard to imagine what it’s like to have Vader for a father.”

“I have no use for sympathy.”

“Yeah,” Han said curtly. “I’d noticed.”

A spark of temper had ignited in his eyes when he walked around the desk and slapped the keypad with casual arrogance. The dimmed screen broke its slumber, brightening to drowsy silver, but the chains of letters and symbols had ceased to make sense. As Han leaned over to read, Luke could feel his body’s warmth brush him.

“What’s this?” Han muttered.

“What?” His brain was scrambling roughly after a sensible thought.

“What you’re studying.” Tapping the screen, Han turned back. “ _Tenebrae_. What’s that mean?”

“Shadows,” Luke said, rationality brought back by a stir of irritation. “It’s — a treatise on conversing with the spirits of the dead.”

“Spirits of the dead...” Han leaned against the desk with a rough chuckle. “That’s stuff for nursery rhymes! Like that old Corellian song about a demon returning to take his unfaithful lover to hell. Come to think of it, I’ve heard songs like that in a lot of places. Dated folklore. Is that what you’re talkin’ about?”

“No.” A sweep of impatience surprised Luke, running hot in his overtaxed nerves as he rose from his seat. “Palpatine wrote this. He summoned the Jedi his servants had killed, to learn from them.”

“Come on!” Han said, discomfort surfacing for a moment. “He couldn’t do that. No one returns from the dead.”

“I’ve spoken to Ben since he died. I’ve seen Yoda. And my father.”

“That’s crazy,” Han said with unwarranted vehemence. “What’s past is past. Must’ve been dreams or... hallucinations.”

“Reality doesn’t end where _your_ perception reaches its limits!” Luke snapped before he could catch his reaction.

Han detached from the desk and stood a pace away, the exact measure of his denial, arms folded. “And that’s what you wanna do, bring ‘em back from the dead? To keep you company?”

“Maybe I need advice,” Luke returned, the forced calm straining. “You wanna know something, Han? I know preciously little about being a Jedi. About what I should do, how I’m supposed to grow into it, let alone teach others.”

“Why’s that so important? You’re closing yourself off from life—” Han interrupted himself with a slicing gesture as if he’d already said too much.

“What do you want?” Luke asked, taking a short step towards him. “Are you telling me not to be different, or not to let it show?”

“Why don’t you just try to be human for a change?”

Desperate humor welled up from some unexplored reservoir. “Look at me, I _am_ human,” Luke returned with a twisted smile. “I just talk to ghosts sometimes.”

The hot temper subsided slowly in Han’s eyes. He raised his head, chin jutting with the resolve his gaze had relinquished. “I’m only suggesting that you be careful. Very careful.”

“You think I need you to tell me that?”

Han almost flinched, as if something had struck a nerve. “All right,” he growled. “Have it your way. I’m here ‘cause the reconstruction teams have discovered some ancient vaults when a tower came down. Whole place’s full of old inscriptions and murals, I’m told — and some look like portraits of Jedi knights. Thought you might like a look.”

“I would,” Luke said tightly. “But why should you care? You think I’d better stay away from all of this. It means nothing to you.”

“Yeah, but it does to you.” Han turned abruptly. “If you don’t want my company, just say so.”

Luke shook his head. “I’m not saying that.”

He would not release Han from his anger. He wondered if Han knew.

* * *

Late afternoon painted heavy shadows across the stairs when they left the archives and entered the transitory twilight of a lift cabin, transporting them ten levels down the vertical city.

A city of bones, Han thought, gazing out at skeletal structures and exposed interiors, patches of pale wall like tender flesh lacerated by scorching blasts.

Where they stepped off the lift, squalid but intact tenements supported the buckling architecture of power. Fallen debris and a caving walkway one level above made a narrow gorge of the alley ahead of them.

“We’ll have to walk from here,” Han said. “No way we can take a glider through some of those tight spots.”

Luke shrugged, his face commanded by the familiar, wary stillness. “Well, let’s go.”

Even when the streets were deserted, faraway noises echoed back from the sky-challenging towers like a constant, whispering surf. Ghosts of the past.

Han hunched his shoulders on an instinct he wanted to disclaim at once. Demons returning to claim unfulfilled promises — and what nonsense next? But through his mind pounded an old rhythm and swept along the tune, the words. _O where have you been, my long-lost love, these seven years and more?_ To hell with Corellian songs and their infamous sentimentality.

Han wondered how much more of it cluttered the back rooms of his brain, ready to be unlocked at random, and why the past would hang on like that, always accumulating weight and distractions. He inhaled dust and doubt and the heavy scents of the city.

“How long will it take?” Luke asked.

“Depends,” Han answered. “Most of these buildings ‘n passages aren’t safe, so we’ll have to take it slow. Maybe at some point they’re gonna excavate the place, but for now...”

Some paces ahead, a tech’s green coverall caught stray light and moved towards them. Han stepped aside to allow the woman past, but her face blanked suddenly, and her industrious stride faltered. For a full second of incomprehension, she stared at Luke.

“What now?” Han muttered uneasily.

“Sith!” the woman whispered and spat over her shoulder in a superstitious gesture of self-protection Han recognized.

“You got a problem, lady?” he snapped at her.

“Han.” Luke’s hand was on his arm, pressing him not to interfere.

The woman took a long stride into safety, and Han glanced after her hurried retreat, impotent frustration rallying protest. “So you’re just gonna put up with that kinda stuff?”

“What else?”

The coolness Han thought he’d unsettled in the archive had returned, white flare shields of total rationality that quenched every sentiment from Luke’s pale eyes. Revealing nothing.

“Okay, so you don’t want any help, you’d rather be a martyr of the faith, fine,” Han said irately. “Just knock me out next time I have a human reaction.” Without another glance at Luke, he stalked on.

At the end of the alley, the wind’s blast caught him full in the chest. Han recalled another storm warning from the local holonet. Coruscant had its own season of inclement winds, turning loose with the onset of spring that fetched only a distant pallor to the sky. And now the winds danced through the city’s disjointed anatomy, curled into its bowels to smash and grab whatever war had passed over.

Before him, perpendicular order broke up into a chance array of leaning walls and skewed steel, sundering the street level. The sky had come down, a brilliant trapeze dead ahead, slanting inward with knives of bronze.

“What is it?” Luke asked from the side.

Han turned, but a mechanical reply disintegrated unspoken.

The wind lit on Luke’s hair, tossing it back into the brazen flares, and coaxed a thoughtless smile from him. A primal brightness consumed his face — and Han almost prayed that one of the lesser gods would show mercy and cut all the light.

He gestured vaguely at the delicate balance of walkways and gantries ahead. “We’d better be careful.”

The voice he used, dry and flat, fell short of conviction, and Luke noticed, too. A swift curiosity colored his expression but shaped no question, except in his eyes. Eyes too perceptive for a face that young, Han thought, invoking with a waned past the ghosts of innocence.

 _There’s no such thing_ , the cynic’s indomitable voice fired back.

Innocence — an underused vocable in Han Solo’s chosen idiom. If he’d ever had it, he’d lost it too fast and too completely to recall its taste or feel. But Luke —

Was that where all the anger came from? Whatever the reason, all his emotional readings were off the scale.

The gantry vibrated under each step Han took. The wind shifted and charged from the side, flapping his jacket to seek out skin with cold fingers. Luke followed without a word until they’d reached the firmer ground of a steel-plated walkway, passing through the collapse of stone and metal.

“So how’s your survey going?” Luke asked conversationally.

Tact and caution formed only a thin cover that could rip anytime.

“Not much fun,” Han said. “Ain’t much left behind anyway, and there’s always the possibility of sabotage. Who knows, maybe they’ve fitted every damn piece of equipment with a self-destruct we just haven’t triggered yet. This place is a junkyard that’d better be left alone.”

“It must’ve been beautiful once.”

“Yeah? Maybe I lack the imagination,” Han said with ill-tempered irony. “I just hope they’re not plannin’ to tie me to a desk around here, once the government’s moved over. I’d prefer a Corellian brig anytime.”

“Seriously?”

Luke’s unconcerned tone raised instant rebellion from Han’s overstrung nerves. “You bet,” he growled.

On the next corner, a minor wind lay in ambush and leapt up to blast them with grit and soot. Brought up short against a moment’s disorientation, Han turned and found Luke watching him.

“What?” he asked. “What’s all that to you?”

“I’m just wondering,” Luke said. His face tightened perceptibly, and for an instant a deeper spark flashed and vanished again in his eyes. “You could’ve had... everything. What exactly would be good enough for you?”

Han stared at him for a mortal second.

 _I know what you’re thinking. It’s me, I’m good for nothing_.

He’d had it all, and then he’d blown it out of the window with a vengeance.

Leia. A career. A career, for crying out loud. So what if he’d been born a malcontent on principle, no matter how much life condescended to pamper him. And here was Luke, asking him to name his ultimate prize —

Han felt the catch in his breath and turned back into the wind. “It’s not a matter of good enough,” he muttered, setting one foot on the next gantry that spanned a dim drop. “I have a reason for what I’m doing. Just like you.”

“Which is what?”

Glancing over the side, Han caught a hint of motion in the nether gloom. Silhouettes merged and disengaged. On the sublevels of the public domain, humble people carried on and cleared away the rubble as they always did. Except that this time, they’d rebuild to suit their own needs. It made a difference.

He had to believe that.

“People,” he said, pausing to gesture down. “People who don’t care shit about politics, the little people who just wanna live ‘n be left alone.”

“I used to be one of them.” A gust of wind snatched the words from Luke’s mouth and almost drowned them. White-knuckled, his hand clenched around the railing.

“Yeah. Me, too.” Han squinted his eyes at the shaded profile. “It matters to you, doesn’t it, what people think—”

“Human after all,” Luke agreed, and dry irony laced his tone.

Han shook off present doubts with an impatient twitch of his shoulders. “Come on, we’d better get movin’, I don’t like the look of the weather.”

On the edge of the sky, a storm front was building, an unbroken mass of black, turbulent clouds. The fierce light brought out a cold copper hue in Luke’s hair when he lifted his head.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t go any further,” he suggested reasonably.

“What, you’re gonna give in that fast?” Double meaning nestled between Han’s thoughts all of a sudden, but the words were out and sharp with challenge.

Lean shoulders squared in immediate reaction. “What have I done to you?” Luke asked. “Why are you here? You disagree, whatever I do. There’s nothing much you seem to like about me these days.”

“That’s not true.” Han faced him across a trench carved by too many questions. _You started this, damnit. Not me_.

How many times had he told himself it was over, the friendship buried, the past wilted, and they were as good as strangers? Maybe that part at least was true.

None of his memories provided a match for the man before him. Elegant, focused, the slender frame steeled to become the will’s perfect vehicle, fine bones of the jaw outlined starkly by a flare of bronze through the building clouds. Edged with a light that questioned the solidity of flesh and bone.

Absurdly, Han recalled his bizarre dream, the river, the urge to encourage a bodiless touch still warm and liquid on his skin when he woke.

And he longed to touch now, with unknown force.

“That way,” Han said, shaking the spell. He pointed to the right where a narrow ledge circled a steelstone bulwark. He started to walk automatically.

“You don’t answer me,” Luke said. “What are you holding out for?”

“’Cause it’s obvious,” Han growled, damning his reactions. “Some basic trust, that’s all I’m askin’.”

“You used to ask for money.”

The wind picked up and sharpened, slamming coldly into Han’s chest when he stepped onto the ledge that creaked subdued protest. He swung a disbelieving glance at Luke who had the nerve to smile. “And you liked me better that way?”

“You always knew what you wanted,” Luke answered, low and breathless.

Han’s face burned from the wind. There was no evasion, no appeal, no excuse. Just a simple truth he’d had coming for over two months, and all that remained was to acknowledge it between them.

 _So take what you want_. For a dim moment, he considered denial. Then there was a rumble above, a screech of metal and Luke’s voice shouting, “Watch it!”

A hand captured Han’s wrist and yanked him back, out of danger’s flight path. A pair of iron props and the debris they’d supported rushed past, rattled the ledge, and Han would’ve lost his balance if not for the arm wrapped firmly around his middle. Luke stood with his back against the wall and held him.

Han breathed out a curse, heart beating high and strange in his throat.

“Afraid?” Luke asked, a small light in his eyes.

“All the time,” Han answered thickly. “That’s how I survive.” He flicked a glance at the squall line that conquered the sky. The strong wind made his eyes water.

When he turned back, a sudden slant to reality had invaded his mind and tilted his perception. Han braced both hands against the wall, avoiding the hold of Luke’s shoulders, and looked straight into his eyes.

Perfection. He’d been right about that.

Han couldn’t guess at the thoughts passing behind the smooth brow, couldn’t fathom the doubt shading Luke’s eyes, blue and startling like a winter morning. But with firm insistence the arm flung around his waist pulled him closer, trapped Han secure from the storm, and the uncompromising power of that grip went right through him to the bone.

Reason and consideration and years of experience all lined up, joining the chorus that declared him crazy — and then there was this.

This heat running through his body, this claiming desire and breathless surprise at wanting so much.

Whipped back from Luke’s forehead, the blond hair shone in a last flash of daylight. A powerful radiance caught in Luke’s eyes, a devouring light that warmed nothing, not even itself. A loneliness that bore no resemblance with Han’s chosen abstinence from company, years ago. A loneliness that proved nothing and belonged nowhere.

He gripped Luke’s shoulders and held on hard, listening, with closed eyes, to the sound of his pounding heart and the gale whistling through the city’s canyons like a missile.

He held Luke and felt how lightly he was made under all that control. He’d stopped breathing.

“Luke,” he said, wind stealing the name from his mouth, pulse thrumming erratically at the side of his throat. “We’d better get away from here. Find some sort of shelter.”

The letting go was harder than he’d anticipated, and he locked his fingers around Luke’s, drawing him along.

Clouds churned in the sky, rolling, quenching the day’s completion. Cold air tugged at Han’s clothes and chilled the fine mist that covered his skin. Near the end of the ledge, the shadows of a weak bulb swung above a narrow door.

Han pushed the door open and left it to the wind to slam it shut behind them. The dusty silence of long-abandoned quarters surrounded them. From the rear of the room, ambient lighting glimmered faintly and deepened the gloom that stretched across sparse furniture, heaps of clothing, and broken kitchenware on the floor. The janitor’s lodge at the base of a low-income apartment block had been looted weeks ago for possessions that would fetch no price on any market.

All this Han absorbed in a thoughtless second before he turned back and caught Luke in his arms. Sudden rain was driven in sleets against the entrance and the cracked window above it, the door rattled anxiously, but the distant thunder rolled only through the chambers of his mind. His face close to Luke’s, Han held him by his shoulders and breathed deeply against the pressure of Luke’s arms encircling him.

“I want you.” His voice was rough and created an echo inside his head.

Shadows played on Luke’s face and sheltered the most elusive beauty. His lips parted for a word that didn’t come.

“C’mon, Luke, let me hear it just once.”

“That I want you the same? Longer than you know.”

The whisper of a breath against his face, to his mouth, and a lasting silence felt through the spoken words. Luke turned his face aside. “What else do you need to know?”

“Nothing,” Han murmured, one hand wrapped around Luke’s jaw, forcing his eyes back before his mouth lowered, catching breath, warm lips, a startled gasp.

When Han opened his eyes again, lightning charged across the sky and lit the window over the door, outlined rain thin as silk and the metal debris that ripped through it. Luke leaned back against the wall, and Han molded himself against his slighter frame, the taste of him on his lips. Thumbs stroking across twin pulse beating sharply under the curve of Luke’s jaw, inhaling the scent of his skin at the temple. He traced the shape of Luke’s mouth with his fingertip before he bent to kiss him again, sinking, drawn like he had been drawn into the clear river of his dream.

He learned the varieties of darkness, the color of Luke’s hair against the wall, the twilight on his cheek and chin and a lighter dampness of sweat on his throat. He learned the curve, the strength and secret of this body, deliberately lenient to desire.

 _Here — hold on to me_.

Previous moments flooded back into his heart, now suggestive, charged with wanting, but it was difficult to think with the floodgates standing wide open, releasing all the wild currents he’d carefully channeled over two months.

And how long had it been anyway, since he’d held another man, that this could feel so new — how long since he’d known the blunt strength of hands answering his grip, desire just as immediate as his own? He possessed no memory except Luke; the past that had enclosed them fractured like a shell, opening toward change — but had Luke ever—?

“You’re not the first, don’t worry,” Luke whispered hoarsely.

“Are you reading my mind?”

Luke shook his head, and Han tried not to think about the others, about a stranger’s hand in Luke’s hair, touching irreverently, but something tore loose and overflowed the banks of reason.

 _Don’t play with me_.

He pushed Luke back against the wall, slipped apart the topmost fasteners of his tunic to place his hand where the collarbone lightened the skin, to feel the racing pulse immediately below. Claiming this patch of smooth skin and the breath that rose and fell under his palm.

The stillness broke. Pressed close, their bodies turned on to each other with wanton speed, with a secret knowledge neither of them had allowed himself to notice before. They moved together, smoothly, driven, heaving. Han saw the same, uneasy bewilderment on Luke’s face, but neither of them spoke.

They shared kisses between ragged breaths, hands roaming, pulling at clothes to explore skin. Han slid his hands up the lean thighs, felt the slightest quiver in every muscle as he pushed harder, urgent between Luke’s open legs, and for the first time heard him moan.

Luke. A perfect stranger in his arms.

Conjured from the dimness, blue eyes glazed as Luke arched against him, as they breached this intimacy together. Belts unbuckled, then a hard grip closed where it was most needed. The sky lit up again. With the sudden brightness, the textures of wall and skin leapt into precise focus, rain drummed against the window and formed an echo on Han’s bare chest. Heart racing, he was fevered, frantic within minutes. He recalled nothing like this — ever — and nothing could stop this transformation of pulse and breath into solid matter and back again. An electric storm danced in his nerves.

Luke’s fingers caught his hand where it moved on him, in desperate demand and warning. With an effort, Han stopped himself, drunken shreds of will placed against a mindless rhythm, searching for a lighter touch, a word, a revelation.

He found the hunger in Luke’s eyes and a sharp tremor in his whole body.

 _Cold? I never knew the first thing about him_. But this savage burning was nothing he could trust.

And then, when they barely seemed to move anymore and looked at each other, breath caught, hands clenched in this pressured silence, tension snapped. Han felt the waves of it reach and go around his body, then leap from within. He groaned deeply.

With a harsh gasp, Luke sagged in his embrace, shaking. Han took his hand and pressed it to his lips, to his forehead. Like a seal against some unknown fever. He’d lost every capacity of speech.

Time slowly returned heartbeats to a less willful rate, until they could break contact and look around. Adapt to the reality of a dim room, the battered shower cubicle, a stained mattress in one of the corners. Han rolled his jacket into a pillow, offering it without a word, and smiled when Luke eased down beside him, eyes wide open.

The vacant horizon from which he’d come still showed in those eyes, a frontier defined by the shimmer and glare of the desert. No past, and no future. But inside this unlikely shelter, a weight of exhaustion settled over him, draining tension from his body, the constant fight, like it was drawing blood.

Han found no voice for the sudden ache that took him.

Luke was falling asleep when he put a hand on his chest but he still reached back and gripped the hand against himself. His weight seemed light against Han’s shoulder, as if Luke balanced it away from him, but his breaths were deep and reassuringly even.

The rain had exhausted itself, slow, solitary drops ticking against the skylight. Han let his eyes drift shut and his mind see what he touched — strands of sunsilk hair and taut skin over warm muscle — and fell deeply asleep.

* * *

In the dead of night, reflex jerked through his mind. If he’d dreamed, the memory effaced itself with awareness, at the sight of another man’s nightmare, the sound of breaths struggling wildly for measure.

Luke was sitting up, arms wrapped around his knees, his whole frame clutched by some bodiless terror, his face locked in reaction.

“What is it?” Han asked softly, but he’d tightened up in alarm and couldn’t help it.

This side of Luke, this side no one had ever seen. Except for those who were now dead, who’d brought it alive in him. Vader, the Emperor. His face revealed more than it had even when they made love.

The blond head bowed, lashes flickered shut to conceal the blindness of Luke’s gaze, of his need. Han brought up a hand, but it froze halfway across the minimal distance. _Touch him now and you’ll get burned_.

Nightmares were their tribute to the war, he rationalized. Paid in private, and they all lived with that. He’d had his own share of being thrust back, from the defenselessness of sleep into the white heart of his most intimate terror. And whatever he could give would be too little anyway.

Too late, Han reached out, fingers brushing the back of a cool hand, stirring no response. “Hey, Luke...”

“It’s all right.” Luke sat up straighter, firmly enclosed within himself, his eyes guarded again, protective of something —

Something that would possess him, Han admitted in silence, if he let it. They lay down again, side by side. Not touching.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

“Is it true?” the librarian asked.

“Is what—?” Luke stopped, flustered because the question exposed his utter distraction.

“You’re his son?” Curiosity had cut a path through the languor of years, and now the woman studied him with more than professional interest.

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem much like him.” Her sudden smile brought an aimless, fleeting sweetness to her face. She spread data wafers on the desk before her as if dealing him a hand of cards. “You work too hard.”

He made an effort to smile back. “I know.”

This day was like any other.

Luke walked a stretch of echoing silence, across the regular patterns of black and white tiles, through to the temples of dormant knowledge. A study screen flickered like a candle devoted to the greater darkness, an empty page waited to be flooded with meaning. Once he slipped into the chair and entered the first sequence of commands, a fully automated routine would take him to the end of this day. He would read, compare, take notes until his head swam and threatened mutiny. And then he’d return to his quarters, collapsing quietly on the bed.

But each morning he woke up expecting the sound of rain and the diffuse, warm scents of a body close to him. As if a single night could overcome years of sleeping alone.

...come awake among the rumor of silk-soft rain, in a palace of winds, with Han sleeping next to him, he’d watched Han a long time, each second vibrant under his skin, at once completely still and restless with the press of words, all the things he’d wanted to say —

But when Han finally woke up, looked him over, and said, “must’ve been a pretty bad dream last night,” he remembered.

The blend of caution and concern in Han’s eyes made it impossible to speak.

Overnight, the storm had dislocated several walkways and piled up new barricades, forcing them to abort their exploration of the vaults. By the time they reached the transport cabins, a gentler wind had dried away the rain.

“We’ll get there,” Han promised. “As soon as the passage’s been cleared.”

And Luke had excused himself before the subtle note of relief in Han’s voice could become too clear, too much to bear.

Three days had passed. Han knew where to find him, and Luke knew better than to wait. But too often he heard again the wind rattling that door.

When the screen winked, laying itself to temporary rest, Luke realized he hadn’t read past the opening lines of the first file. The same file he’d studied three days ago, all of his mind absorbed into cool reflection. Words and mysteries and the Spirits of the Dead, desires coming alive to claim —

Luke slapped a key and urged the text back from its electronic slumber, but his head buzzed on a different frequency, and his stomach twinged. The tides of day and night had returned to his blood. He was tired and hungry and could no longer ignore himself.

 _Damn you, Han_.

The chair scraped angrily on smooth marble when he pushed it back.

Daylight stung his senses and opened pathways for the common chaos of voices, odors, and a vapid humidity when Luke exiled himself from the archive’s dimness. Thick breezes brushed his face, and some levels below, screeching hydraulics announced the presence of construction droids, rummaging through a twilight maze. Luke took a deep breath.

He wandered around the city for several hours. Heads turned surreptitiously. His random path was lined with brief glances and open stares, and sometimes he caught a darkly muttered comment as soon as he’d turned his back. _It’s him_.

Whatever that meant.

 _Spirits of the dead_ , he thought again, as if he’d been lined up with them. _Tenebrae_. It was their absence that had made him wonder, as if his teachers had been wired to the short-circuit they called his destiny. Ben Kenobi. Yoda. Gone. Gone after he’d become their black knight on the chessboard, to play out their battle plan. And if he could truly draw them back, conjure shape from the boundless radiant field, their answers would be no different. Was it mercy, that he wouldn’t try? Or another effort to reclaim himself from the frosty halo of public fame? Shot through as it was with double meaning and doubt.

Vader’s son. An outline of him pinned to the unblinking public eye. Visibility sat on him like a stiff garment. After all this time of living in the gap between hero worship and a renegade secret, after all this time spent waiting...

At least the waiting should be over now.

Luke passed through a webwork of suspicion still anticipating the one glance that captured him without future or past, no names, no reason to be, except —

The way Han had looked at him, torn from sleep, unable to filter the darker feelings from his glance. Recoiling. But the hand that had reached for him was gentle. Offered a shattering tenderness Luke couldn’t answer or endure.

The memory made its agonizing path through all his senses.

 _There’s more of me. There’s me_.  
_Release me_.

And now that he’d been released, he didn’t know to where, for what.

Luke glanced at the sky and walked on, carefully avoiding the area where he suspected Han at work, until dusk seeped through Coruscant’s thin atmosphere and a jostle of wind reminded him to return to his quarters.

Eat. Sleep. Think of nothing.

* * *

There was no light in the sky stretching far and high behind the window. An hour before moonrise, Luke woke again. To the dampness of sweat plastering the thin sheet against him like a shroud, and a heartbeat rolling like a distant drum. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the slow, endless tremors refused to ebb. The remains of a nightmare that had plagued him for months after the battle of Endor, until he’d learned how to shield his mind from the wanton recollection of flesh and nerve.

But now he dreamed again — always the same dream, refining itself to a pitch of mechanical precision that reproduced every sensation and hauled him through an infinite loop, winding up tighter and tighter each time. Until reality collapsed into the cramped, lightless space below the Emperor’s dais. Cornered, caged, stalked down to this precipice of rage, he pressed his back into naked steel. And the darkness filled with their breaths.

Thin, greedy breaths that presaged triumph from the Emperor. Mechanized breaths escaping a black mask, surging with impatience. He was just learning to recognize those subtle shifts of mood in his father’s presence, but the sound ringing in his ears was that of his own shallow breath, and it was bound to betray him.

 _Don’t look now you can’t see me you can’t_ —

They were watching him, each from his chosen darkness, tracing him by his primal terror of being found. He’d retreated as deeply within himself as he could, clenched up inside until it hurt — and there was nothing left, nothing but this bundle of fear and rage and snarling instincts that he’d become. If only he could stop breathing.

The black helmet turned, catching a gleam from above. _You cannot hide forever_.

He screamed, releasing himself into darkness. And then, on the very edge of waking, it would begin anew.

Luke rubbed both hands over his bare arms and sat up slowly, the clean, cool air of his quarters a sudden weight against his chest, the room a fissured shell around him.

He went for a shower and returned to watch Coruscant’s larger moon ghost across the sky. From blackness, the cityscape emerged through a thin sheen of light, infinitely remote. Nothing could come as close as the fitful tension in his body, collapsing the distance within himself, and of course he knew exactly what had brought back the dreams.

Three days and three nights, and never a minute of rest. Resentment stirred his thoughts.

 _This can’t be me_. This convolution of random terror and electrified anticipation belonged to another life, a life he’d never led.

When Luke stretched out on the bed again, he could feel each crease in the sheet and the slight roughness of his palm where it rested on his stomach. Locked within himself, exposed to remembered sensations that felt too real, like the phantom pain from his lost hand.

And Han didn’t have the slightest idea.

 _Who are you that you can do this to me, and what is it inside me that I didn’t know—? No one gets near me_.

He’d tried. Exorcising romantic hopes from his new life, scattering affections, persuading himself that touch couldn’t close a single gap, until all those surface efforts flew apart in the rush of one desire.

 _All of me. Just once_ — and it should have been enough. Too much, too little, released into another spell of waiting, abandoned to a memory that could still melt his bones. _Not possible. I am alone_.

But from the shadows, Han watched him, a split second’s brilliance casting him in silver and black, his face locked in concentration. While the brightness went out, the touch lingered on into blind, heated darkness, pulling a slow tide from his body.

Luke felt his own pulse between the collarbones and recalled the texture of Han’s mouth, brushing the softer skin there, traveling up his throat. The memory lived on the inside of his skin, so electric now that his own touch stirred a shiver when he slid his hands down his chest.

Han’s hand, inventing caresses, lighting on the inner map of his body. Incredulously, Luke traced the flickers of heat that defined him anew, in the solitude of his bed. His breath came fast, his stomach fluttered against his palm.

There — and there.

He felt again the scalding pressure of Han’s lean frame, the surge of hips coaxing him into a clear rhythm, and his own hands running over his body could not reclaim what another had owned — this intimate knowledge of him, right down to every unexpected response and demand.

A touch set against his skin like a fine blade, to cut loose the hurting, the hunger. The holding on — frantic, greedy, mute — yet lighter than that and, for a final moment, not touch at all, pulling shudders from his flesh. Limbs loose and shaking, Luke couldn’t breathe through his arousal. He bit down hard on his lower lip.

Release came like a tug of night on his defenseless body, and in the stillness hung an echo of his own voice. He sagged gratefully into half-sleep, floating in the diffuse greyness between thought and feeling, until stars penetrated a thin cover of clouds behind the window, like a promise.

 _Han_ , he thought. _Don’t you want more than this?_  
_And if this is it, if it’s over now, who’ll keep our hopes for us?_

The hurt sat in every muscle, gathering over his heart, but he could keep it locked up inside, another secret to join the rest. Segregate the part of himself that had broken free. Or he could go, the way he’d wanted Han to leave.

 _Leave — but don’t leave me, and don’t stay so near_.

The truth, he realized, was just that, a matter of distance. All through the war, Han had stuck to his outside position, he’d kept up that raw, hard vigilance to the last. Until the carbon freeze ended the truce between allegiance and detachment. Ironic, that he’d come out of it blind.

Faced with the general they had turned Han into, Luke remembered thinking, _now it’s me, on the outside, we’ve just traded places_ — but that notion of a different balance never made up for the loss. He’d trusted Han to spot the flaws in every hope and ambition for too long. In his dreams for himself, more than anything. All his anger, his disbelief had built from there, when it seemed that Han had sold out after all, discarding the truth of who they had been. Not public property yet, accidental heroes strained to breaking point in the grip of change. Together and apart, but still caught up in the same fight.

Luke got up quietly. The changed balance being what it was, he had only one option left.

By dawn, he’d collected all he would need for the journey. There were other places in the galactic Core where he could continue his research, and the distance would bring alleviation, open up space for thought. For breath.

Stepping out into the dawn-frozen street, Luke watched the sky and could almost hear the roar of engines, the shivers of bridled power joining his urge to fly.

 _Is this how it will be?_ he thought, amazed, and recalled the burst of triumph on Han’s face when they’d made their first jump to lightspeed together. _I leave, and you stay behind?_

He felt hollow, as if too much were missing from his body, all but the knowledge of future want and silence.

 _Keep my memory_ , he wrote out a parting message in his mind, _all of it, Han, keep me alive_.

 _It’s all or nothing now_.

* * *

Each day, the strictly regimented hours from dawn to dusk gave his mind pause. To extend that conditional blessing, Han spent the excessive rest of his energy on the city’s older levels, enlisting with the workers who cleared the passage to the vaults. Under pressure of packed debris that crushed stone to a fine, grey dust, the hallway had buckled, and the going was slow. Just outside the entrance, the wind wrestled with loose fittings.

Han shut out the sound, awareness dispersing into rhythmic breath and movement. The shovel scraped and skated over a slate-grey mass. He straightened, wiped his sleeve against his forehead, knuckled his eyes with one hand. He dug the shovel’s blade into crunched stone and pulverized mortar.

“Nothing’s worth this grind,” a voice wandered in on his mindlessness. “I’ll be hanged if we break through in a week.”

“Then get ready to hang!” Han snapped over his shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

Just when had he become so obsessed with this place? _Yeah, when? Three days and almost three nights_.

The robotic motions took over until he could picture himself as part of a human machine, feet planted firmly on ancient stone, adapted to the breathing pattern of deep waters, all sweat and bone and muscle. Except for the absurd cadence his brain had fallen into, with a fretful run of rhymes.

 _O where have you been_...

He recalled more from that blasted Corellian song now. The demon’s return, the journey across the sea and the storm, wailing sprites and white foam thrown in for drama.

_He struck the top-mast with his hand, the fore-mast with his knee, and he broke the gallant ship in two and sank her in the sea._

Considering yourself a sunk ship? Han mocked himself. Not quite. Sprung a leak, keeled over, but not run aground yet.

The vaults were an escape, perhaps a necessary pretense. Two days ago, he’d walked into the archive, blithely ignoring the distress signals of higher rationality. Luke had eased back into rigorous seclusion — what more did he need for an answer? — but he’d tried anyway.

From her empty desk, the librarian tendered an inviting smile she hadn’t used on his last visit. An image fired in Han’s brain — of Luke receiving this woman’s smile — and it set off a chain reaction racing from misplaced jealousy to alarm.

He could see it now, the leash that he’d looped around his own neck. As if everything Luke did should involve him, too. The truth he’d avoided sailed up from the dusty backdrop of unread tapes and books. All this time after the war, he’d stayed on, traded a living for a compromise, on the off chance that Luke might still need him.

 _And now you’re out to collect your dues?_ As if staking a claim meant that Luke owed him. Han had turned on his heel. Notions of ownership always marked the decline to a first circle of hell, and his own state of entrapment gave him the creeps.

 _You’re not the first_ , Luke’s voice seized him. _Won’t be the last either_ , Han added, turning the knife. In the great book of terminal follies, he’d register as another episode that had briefly ruptured Luke’s path to ultimate serenity. And surely Luke resented that.

 _So do the walls come down when you think of me?_ Han thought sardonically, as he shoveled up grit and rubble. He scooped up a handful of stone chips, and while he let them run through his fingers noticed a streak of faded blue paint on the wall.

Seconds later, he was coughing dust, the sudden avalanche coming up to his hips and halting there. Han cursed profusely when he found his breath. The darkness straight ahead exhaled cool air.

“See?” Han said angrily, accepting a supportive hand from a fellow worker, and gestured at the opening. “Told you it wouldn’t take long.”

He pulled his legs free and scrambled over the drift of dirt and crushed stone. Behind the collapsed doorway, a greater emptiness filled with the sound of his boots and murmurs from the men who followed. Several glowtorches snapped on, peeling colors from the dark. And the walls stared back at them.

Every square centimeter had been painted over in layers of bright pigment. Tall figures shouldered the roof and looked down mildly as if granting absolution to posterity. Some human, and some not, but each defined against a muted backdrop. A shadowline of armies, dim clusters of mountains, a girdle of slender spires. Each holding a lightsaber so that its radiance caught in their eyes.

Han wandered through the chamber, searching one painted face after the next. The flare of torches brightened halos around the workers’ silhouettes, but after a first inspection of the murals they lost interest and filed out, leaving him to peer up into high shadows.

His torchlight kindled the deep blue of an artificial sky. Han swept the beam aside, across the walls, and felt the hollow darkness of a well close again behind him. Luke would want to study all the inscriptions around those paintings, he thought automatically — just before his light struck a familiar pale-haired ghost all in black, poised to step down from the wall and become flesh and blood. Blue eyes regarded him with the profound coolness of a distant era.

 _Look again_ , Han told himself, still stiff with recognition. _This ain’t nothing like him_.

The resemblance had to be accidental, perhaps a hysterical product of his imagination. Just another spirit trying to return from the dead. Han stepped closer, fingers tracing the texture of the wall blending into pale skin, his hand small against a painted arm. He closed his eyes to conjure a different image, but nothing came except taste of skin and music of breath and the grip of Luke’s hand around his neck.

He’d stopped mourning the reckless kid Luke had once been. He’d let him go — after a single night, he’d finally let the memory go to discover the man Luke had become, the stranger. One night had shattered every recollection, and now he had only this. This surge of adrenaline and premonition.

Han stared at the wall, his gaze painting it over with an unexpected embrace, half-lit against a backdrop of night, surrounded by hanging fire. Copper radiance and the lash of wind playing through blond hair, and the storms that occurred only in Luke’s eyes. But Luke had once again made up his mind to bury it all within. There wasn’t any point indulging this particular madness.

Han flicked off his torch. Time to cash it in for the night and make up for a recent round of insomnia.

Outside, he swatted dirt off his clothes and wondered, as he made his way back to the inhabited sectors, if he looked like some ancient statue crawling from its dry and dusty den. Or a second-hand bogeyman.

When Han tested his appearance on the patrons in a back-alley bar, half an hour later, no one except the servodroid spared him a first glance. Music pumped through stale air, and he folded himself into a low-slung seat while the droid poured him a drink, an amber shot of hope. Hope for sleep. Which wouldn’t come any sooner than it had the nights before.

The doors swung wide again to admit a pair of shaggy-looking men. Spacers, Han could tell by their swagger, by their blustery tones and the way they slumped against the bar. Seen a million suns spill their gold into vacuum, sailed along the shores of every black hole in the quadrant, so get out of my light.

Now that Coruscant was open territory they came in to check out the deals.

Han swirled the drink around in his glass, around and around —

_Was I ever like that?_

He sure as hell had been. Shaking the walls, rattling the cage, inviting trouble to take him to the bottom of every dank hole in the galaxy. All for the promise of liberty, you’d fly with your eyes closed, until sooner or later you’d hit something. Something stronger than your own thick skull. With a delay of years, it had hit him hard. Han still felt the punch to his stomach.

_Yeah, why don’t you go bark at the moon?_

He’d never wanted anything but what he couldn’t have. There was assurance in the fact that you didn’t really own your life, because nobody else could lay claim to it either. The most basic error, maybe.

He ordered another drink. He remembered the vaults and the liquid sense of the place, and the painting that was nothing like Luke at all. And through all this he was searching for a crucial moment, the moment that’d changed all others. Perhaps he’d been in the process of falling for years.

Falling into this well of solitude the moment Luke reached out for him, just once, his unsteady mind uncertain where the shallows ended and deep water took up. And just like this gutted city he was no longer secure in himself, as if something had turned his insides out.

_What’s become of us, Luke?_

Lovers. Too late to think that, too early to say it out loud and make it history.

Couldn’t endure his strength, nor his weakness — and the glitter of a beauty that was even harder to bear.

Han slammed his glass down, aware he’d almost spilled a truth he hadn’t yet confessed to himself. It was morning when he left the bar. And his comlink whistled.

“What?” he snapped, meaning: _not now_.

“Han,” the voice of Wedge answered crisply. “We have an emergency on the second moon. A detonator went off in the middle of an atmosphere dome.”

“Just don’t tell me it blew the whole thing apart,” Han said, squinting his eyes at the brightening sky and the bleached outline of the larger moon.

“It didn’t. But some of the internal structures’ve collapsed, and something needs to be done to stabilize the dome, or else—”

“Casualties?” Han interrupted.

Wedge’s tone changed. “Too many,” he answered curtly. “I don’t know any of the details yet. Luke called only a minute ago.”

“Luke?” Now his heartbeat had contracted a sudden jitter. “What in all hells’ name’s he doing up there?” Han stopped himself. “He’s all right though? Okay, I’m coming. See you in a bit, Wedge.”

 

From alarm grew anger and another burst of adrenaline, turning into speed the second Han lowered the Falcon’s ramp. Before him hung a grainy dimness, as if the entire moon base had disintegrated to molecular waves waiting to collapse back into form.

He plunged right into it, towards the uncertain outlines of dislodged structures and silhouettes moving in a flurry. Something had triggered a detonation from the heart of the maintenance station — unless those charges had been programmed to go off at random, to celebrate the perpetuity of war.

Across the wreckage swarmed techs like insects washed out of their hive; damp decay stifled the air along with rolling fumes and slowly settling dust. Han sprinted across this impossible postwar battlefield, anger hammering in his throat. Over the comlink, Wedge reported from the atmosphere generators. Repairs were in progress. A troop of droids had started to seal the fractures at the base of the dome.

Somewhere on the right, patches of blurry white assumed the shape of a med tech crew, shepherding antigrav stretchers towards the injured. Disjointed details jumped Han’s vision — blood drawing trails through the grime that covered skin and clothes, hands groping around the debris — but he didn’t break his run, each step jolting pointless rage through him. Where the hell was Luke?

A slow rumble slid trepidations through the ground, shouts erupted over a sequence of thuds and crashes. Skidding over chunks of smashed tile, Han rounded a broken corner and nearly careened into a small group of coveralled men hauling their wounded up from a basement. He grabbed an arm, a shoulder, and didn’t hazard a closer look.

“Anybody else down there?” he asked, out of breath, as they eased another body to the ground. Over a narrow flight of stairs, steel transoms were steepled precariously, bending under the weight of debris.

“I’m the last.”

The sound of Luke’s voice returned Han to the stairs in a rush of relief. Luke walked up slowly from the dimness, for the moment only a slender man covered in dust and soot like the rest of them, his hair snowed with ash. A smear of blood slanted from his right ear to his cheek.

“What the hell happened?” Han reached a hand to him.

A small, bruised smile stormed his heart.

“What’s it look like?” Luke returned.

Han grabbed his hand, scratches covering the skin to the wrist, and tightened his grip as if he wouldn’t let go for the next century of disasters to come. “Like you jumped the first chance to be a goddamn hero all over again,” he said in a roughened voice. “Why don’t you just use the Force?”

A tremor like a distant radio wave went through the hand clasped against his own.

“I did use the Force,” Luke said. “That roof would’ve come down a while ago, if I hadn’t.”

He swayed to a tide of exhaustion, and Han’s arm went around his shoulders as if he could slip it between Luke and his constant, damning efforts. Shield him from abstract forces like the moon’s artificial gravity. “So how come you’re here?”

But the surface patterns of his thinking disengaged in the motion that brought them closer. Leaning into him, gripping back for a hold, Luke was less than perfect, more than human, and something more piercing than desire cut into Han’s breath.

“I could sense that something was wrong,” Luke answered in distracted tones. “The detonator blew a minute after I’d landed. Call it premonition.”

“Convenient,” Han muttered. His fingers moved against Luke’s shoulder in a fumbling search pattern. Gravel crunched somewhere behind him and accented the sudden, halting silence that could veer off in every direction.

“Sir,” a voice intruded. “We have a problem.”

“We’ve got several, for all I can see.” Han turned reluctantly, to stare into the med tech’s face, individual features lost to the greyness of dust and exhaustion.

“Here’s another. We’ll have to delay planetside transport for at least an hour.”

“We can’t. Some of these people look like they might not survive if we don’t take them to the clinic fast.”

“That’s right,” the man said angrily. “But there’s another storm brewing, and we’d have to land outside the med center. Our shuttles weren’t built for rough weather conditions.”

Han nodded. Here was one obliging problem that didn’t even require a second thought. “Take the critical cases to the Falcon,” he said. “I’ll fly them down.”

When he jogged the distance towards his ship, it occurred to him that Luke must have been on his way out, departing Coruscant at a moment’s notice, without a word goodbye.

* * *

After hours of severely limited thought processes, his mind was now moving too fast. Luke rubbed an aching wrist, muscles easing all the way to the shoulder, and struggled for a likeness of inner balance. From all around him, the constant swell and press of agony sought out his most vulnerable nerve — and there was Han’s presence, commanding his attention with an abrupt swing from belligerence to unpredicted warmth. Before he took off again.

Luke could have returned to his X-wing, now that the crisis had been channeled into the lesser chaos of emergency protocols, but instead he followed the general drift of activity to the parked shuttles. Ahead of him, runlights peeled the shape of the Falcon from air grown thick like stagnant waters.

He remembered the slow surge of tension and weariness on Han’s face, deeper than anything prompted by immediate trouble. It wasn’t strain or pointless rebellion that had strung Han tense like this, it was feeling empty too long. Luke recognized all the signs and wondered if Han could read them as easily on his own face.

At the foot of the Falcon’s ramp, a red flightsuit flashed.

“Hey, Luke!” Wedge called, waving to him. “You okay?”

“Fine.” He raised his voice over a first hum of engines testing their capacities. “Anything I can do?”

“Yeah. Get in there,” Wedge said, indicating the Falcon’s hatch over his shoulder. “He’ll need a capable copilot.”

Approaching him, Luke saw a flicker in the other man’s eyes, a troubling knowledge that hadn’t been there before. Wedge grinned self-consciously.

“You’re still running for best pilot in the fleet.”

“I thought I was out of that particular competition,” Luke returned after a pause.

The grin lightened. “Sorry, pal. No one gets out so easy.” Wedge reached across to clap his shoulder. “Now get in there. And good luck.”

“Thanks,” Luke said quietly, for lack of other words.

Stretchers and portable life-support units crowded in the Falcon’s corridor, and the air was heavy with labored breaths and moans.

Luke slipped into the copilot’s seat, strapping in, for a moment absorbed into the familiarity of the cockpit, the vibrancy of leashed power haunting the flight deck, and Han’s presence at its center.

Without lifting his eyes from the control board, Han was just as aware of him. “Ready?” he asked.

“Standing by.”

The Falcon plowed through a billow of repulsor steams and curved away smoothly, gliding past a double set of airlocks to confront black vacuum. After another turn, Coruscant commanded the view, enclosed in a tenuous film of atmosphere and frozen cloud-eddies.

“Where’s Chewie?” Luke asked.

“Couldn’t get him anywhere near a place with no trees and no green things growing.” Han flicked a brief glance in Luke’s direction, his mouth set in an uncompromising line. “Everybody’s due a break sometimes.”

The small distance between them was charged with static tension again, some pent-up grievance waiting for a chance to flare at the worst possible moment.

Luke made himself relax in Chewbacca’s wide chair, part of his mind taking stock of aching muscles and bruises. For hours he’d struggled alongside the moon’s harried populace, admitted into their ranks when all that counted was another pair of hands and whatever else he could do, and no one asked for names. In this reduced cosmos, he’d felt only his body, the welcome strain on sinew and muscle. Remote from the rest of himself, at ease for a limited time.

Before them, the planet rushed up like a grey duracrete wall. Clouds unfroze and wrapped around the freighter, releasing a first blast like a warning.

“This is gonna be rough,” Han said. “Keep the acceleration compensator steady, so nobody gets tossed about.”

The control board shrilled and blinked through its entire range of electronic dismay as he pointed the Falcon downward, at a broiling blackness stitched with lightning.

“Shut that down,” Han snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

“I hope so,” Luke muttered, echoing himself across years.

Gales rocked the Falcon. His hands moved automatically, adjusting the compensator, calling up planetary radar data, and in the middle of all this he kept a silent watch over Han and the change claiming his face as he rolled and sailed the Falcon through the storm.

Churning darkness captured the viewport in denser clouds, and Han cursed under his breath, his expression lighting up with anger and exhilaration in equal measure, a film of sweat forming on his forehead and cheekbones.

The Falcon dipped and swung through a savage dance. With a catch in his throat, Luke watched the familiar face — strong-boned, full of pride and passion — all the open contradictions a sign that Han was whole, two sides enfolding each other.

“Watch this,” Han murmured, pointing to the outflung streamers of a cyclone. “Gonna dive past that one, then we’ll ride the jet stream closest to our landing vector.”

The squall took them with a judder that ran through the deck plates like skin, but the Falcon sheared smoothly aside, and Han tossed him a grin that stripped years off this moment. Memory flashed between them, sharp with soundless laughter and the lesser magic of flight. On the controls, Han’s fingers kept time with the storm’s buffeting force, playing fast and loose.

Something stronger than memory kindled all over Luke’s skin. A slow, betraying ache seeped through his bones, a need to waste himself in this fire that Han had stirred from him. Shattering, healing all at once. He could indulge that absurd hope only for a moment.

“There!” Han breathed out.

Clouds parted and the city materialized in a burst of black, angular shapes. Han leveled out, aiming the Falcon at a landing platform outside the only operational clinic.

“Now tell me the odds,” he said, the crooked grin and a rattled look conflicting on his face.

Luke pushed from his seat. “The odds were against us. As usual.”

* * *

“Here. This is where I’m staying.”

Han kicked the speeder’s brakes, and the craft screamed sharply into a ninety-degree turn. “Here?”

The speeder’s nose almost scraped a ‘crete wall, covered in brown shadows up to twenty floors of dimmed windows. Prefab apartments for minor Imperial functionaries, Han judged.

“It’s close to the archive,” Luke said, getting out.

Han jumped over the vehicle’s side as if he’d been invited along. “So you’ve made up your mind to go back there?” he asked and sent an idle glance at the lowering sky. “To go on looking for your demon?”

“My demon...” With a strained laugh, Luke turned, halfway to the building’s entrance. The ride across the city had swept his hair clean of dust and ash, but his clothes were still streaked with soot, and a shadow of dried blood clung to his cheekbone. “I’ve about finished my research here,” he said. “For the time being.”

No more information was forthcoming, and Luke’s expression volunteered only the usual measure of vigilance.

“Really.” Han stepped closer.

Two hours ago, when they’d set the Falcon down safely, he’d felt energized down to the last atom of himself, thinking that all he needed from life was a different job — and perhaps a minor memory-wipe. But the flush of contentment had ebbed, loss of sleep was crawling up his bone-marrow, and he began to watch out for something to unhitch his temper.

“So where were you going, before you had your... premonition? Running away from yourself? From me?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Luke shot back, but his voice wavered.

“What — to see you run, or to know I’m the reason?” Han asked with deliberate flippancy. The dry echoes of his steps rang back from the building as he drew closer to Luke. “Am I?”

He heard the condemning uncertainty in his voice and held Luke’s gaze with explicit defiance. Everything occurred in those eyes, in that pale blue gaze out of darkness, but the rest was control — which had become unbearable, after he’d seen it falter once.

“Am I?” he repeated in a softer tone, and raised a hand to Luke’s face, brushing it lightly against the bruised skin.

A muscle slanted in Luke’s cheek, a stir of uncontrollable reaction. Han watched his lips part with a quick breath.

“C’mon, Luke — you wanna stand apart, put life on hold and wait ‘til someone calls you back from the dead?”

“No,” Luke said hoarsely. “But you don’t always have a choice.”

Han looked straight into his eyes, and now he was definitely going under. A small knot of anger twitched in his chest, choosing his answer for him. “So you’re planning to martyr yourself.”

Luke flared, bright like a torch. “They made me different — _it_ made me different. The Force. And I have to live with it.”

“Then you’re not doing a very good job!” Han flung the words back at him. “Most of the time, it’s like you’re only half-alive.”

“Yeah? You wanna know something? I feel just the same way about you.”

Han took a deep breath. “You’re not a good liar, Luke.” He chased his anger into a semblance of composure, calculating the next move with a final reserve of coolness. “I can tell how you feel. First you hate me for not wanting enough, and now you hate me for wanting too much — is that about it?”

“I don’t hate you,” Luke said thickly.

“And that’s supposed to be a comfort?” Han returned with deliberate sarcasm. “But you don’t feel too strongly about anything anymore, do you?”

A flash of intense reaction slid across Luke’s face and made way for a taut stillness that gave Han a mark for his aim. If he didn’t get an answer now, he never would.

“Come on, take a swing at me,” he said, flare shields full up, to block every doubt. “Must be something else you’ve wanted for a long time, right?”

“Shut up.” Luke’s voice was a dry rasp, like sandpaper against his skin.

He could see it coming, and although the fist opened at the very last instant and the better part of its force was caught back, the blow still landed Han flat on his back, incredulously rubbing his jaw, a copper taste in his mouth.

Luke knelt beside him, wiped the blood from his lips with an expression that stabbed right at Han’s heart. He sat up, determined to take advantage of the moment’s fragility, and caught Luke to him.

“Have I wronged you in another life?” he murmured.

Luke shook his head, then lowered his face, his forehead resting against Han’s shoulder. “It’s me. I’m the reason.”

Through the muscle he’d gripped, Han could feel the terrible tension forcing a pressured tone into Luke’s voice, a seething pain that shouldn’t be recalled with such violence. And all he wanted was to get under Luke’s skin, love him so hard he wouldn’t remember anything, or anybody.

“I’m sorry, Han, I never seem to—”

“It’s all right, kid,” Han stopped him, meaning it, hoping it would be. Luke had lived inside his self-made armor for so long, it’d grown on him like second skin. And trying to chip it off would only make things worse. “Guess we both needed that.”

Uneven heartbeats crammed into his throat when the blond head lifted again.

“Maybe,” Luke said, his expression not yet settled into something readable. “And maybe it’s that I wanted you to have everything I couldn’t. Freedom. I guess I thought it would be easier without you around. Without anyone who knows me the way you do.”

Han shook his head. “What about Leia?”

“She’s at one with the way things are going, like she always was.” _Whole_ , he didn’t say.

Protest caught askance in Han’s chest. On Endor, when Luke had returned, he’d seen something flash in his eyes, something whole and pure and hard to believe. Illusion, he’d labeled it afterwards, because it vanished again too fast to be real. But now —

Luke pushed to his feet, drawing him along, and Han kept his arm locked firmly around the slim waist.

“Why?” he asked. “Tell me.”

A hand trailed up his throat and into his hair. Han was about to lose his breath again when Luke pulled his head down, when the lowered voice grazed his senses and polarized all the banked energy in his nerves.

“I’ve lost everything I had, but I never had you.”

Reaching before he could sink, he held Luke against himself and took his mouth — touching a shadow, urging the fire on until reality lost its hold over his mind — and like the last time, something possessed them, aligned the threads of desire. The rush of Luke’s heart against his chest. Something more delicate wove through him, volatile and teasing — _will you let me touch you like this, can I let myself—?_

Luke’s fingers twisted into his hair as he pressed closer, and every response betrayed the starved years — not of desire, but of gentleness, and a touch willing to learn him. A shudder went through his whole body like a path of electricity. And he pulled back.

Han almost groaned in frustration.

Luke watched him, probing for a truth so deep it had to be hidden perfectly. But there was nothing else he could surrender, not even if he wanted to, no uncharted depth to disclose.

“You were right, you know, you make it real difficult to like you,” Han said huskily, dragging irritation back to the surface for a hold.

“What are you trying to say?”

“That I don’t want a life without you, damnit!” And it wasn’t a feeling he recognized anymore. He could see Luke’s breath catch roughly in his throat.

“How long?”

Han’s anger collapsed. “Does it matter? Or is it that you’ve been waiting so much longer?”

A startled softness invaded Luke’s eyes and brought a brightening of too many questions — but no decision yet.

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

 

The bathroom door stood half-open. Luke leaned against the desk and watched Han splash water against his face, washing the blood off his broken lip. The room beyond him was lit by a pale amber light, defining no features except the shadow scythe of the mirror and the basin’s shell-white curve.

“So what are your plans?” Han asked in the tone of casual conversation. “If part of High Command wants you out of the way—”

“I won’t do them the favor to simply disappear,” Luke answered, less than half his mind considering the question. He watched the water bead on Han’s face and throat, still amazed at how fast Han’s resilience could take over and turn his unsuspected openness into sobriety.

“You shouldn’t.” The long back straightened, and Han ran a wet hand into his hair. “Luke,” he said slowly. “Ain’t this the worst case scenario, the thing that always held you down? Now people know about your father, you don’t have to walk around on tiptoe anymore.”

Something dry rose in Luke’s throat, an edge of laughter or disbelief. “And what kind of part do _you_ think I should play?”

“You could try ‘n make yourself into a thousand things, and you’d probably succeed.” Han shrugged. “Or grab the chance to stop all that. Your choice.”

 _You think it’s that easy?_ Luke paused for breath. Perhaps he’d forgotten how to choose, perhaps he’d trapped himself in the tangles of destiny when so many choices were made for him.

“And before I forget,” Han went on, “I made it into the vaults yesterday. You’ll wanna go and take a look at them. Before you leave.”

The mirror reflected an abrupt gesture of the hand and a slender trickle snaking down his breastbone. No longer the judge of his own desires, Luke detached from the desk and moved for the center of the room, as though he’d trap himself if he stayed too long in one place.

“Will you take me there?”

“If you want.”

 _Yes. I want_. He met Han’s eyes in the mirror and kept the blame for himself. It wasn’t the way Han touched him, it was the way he reacted, the way he craved that touch until alarm escalated every longing. He grasped a piece of wall and turned aside.

Time was unfolding into silence like a hand. A more delicate skin had been ripped and shed, leaving them unprotected, to each other, to the invasive light of the moment. Han stepped out of the bathroom and stood at his shoulder.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice gentle.

Love, Luke thought, should find an answer for him, more than the winded pressure in his chest, this unabating hunger. He probed the feeling like a wound. And if he released all that—

“I don’t recognize myself anymore,” he said, turning slowly.

“And you don’t like that. I can relate. More than you know.”

Something in Han’s face gave away how much his sobriety had cost him, and Luke knew that Han wouldn’t touch him again unless he invited it. He felt strangely hollow, as if the very essence of him was changing to something of greater lightness.

“I’m not asking you to understand. It’s the things you see, that you _don’t_ understand...” He couldn’t begin to explain, or balance those contradictions with a better offer.

“Maybe that’s the only way to go,” Han answered, defenseless in his uncertainty. “Blow all the memories to bits and wait what’s still holding up when the dust settles.”

_Who we were, what we’ve become — and who’ll figure it out if we don’t?_

“All right.” Han’s shoulders pulled up, suggesting a shrug. “Just... promise you’ll give me a sign, okay?”

Luke saw the emptiness return to his face, expecting at least a spark of pride, but nothing came. Then that tenebrous face was averted, to the shadows, and he had only a second left to choose, couldn’t let go and yet —

— to need so much from another, to live through the sudden loneliness and the nightmares, and to be needed in turn — not for what he could do, but for what he was, even the things he’d never known in himself —

“Han.” Luke’s chest filled as if he’d just learned how to breathe again. His fingers captured a lean wrist, uncompromising. The dark head turned. 

“Come closer.”

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

**Author's Note:**

> First published in ELUSIVE LOVER 2, 1997.
> 
>  _Tenebrae_ (‘shadows’ or ‘darkness’) used to be part of the Catholic Easter liturgy and refers to the gradual extinguishing of all candles, commemorating the death of Christ. It’s also Cicero’s Latin translation for the Greek _Keres_ , the demons of violent death.
> 
> The Corellian song Han recalls is the popular Scottish ballad ‘The Daemon Lover’ (aka ‘James Harris’ or ‘The House Carpenter’).


End file.
